Coming to Age of Intelligent Document Processing

📍 It All Starts With Data

For years, we celebrated the rise of structured data. We marveled at real-time dashboards, sensors, transaction logs. When AI and GenAI made centerstage we focused on Audio, video, Speech, and images. Our excitement to works with the new channels of digital data creation filled our business plans. At the sidelines, we ignored or forgot a  ‘pirates treasure map’ — documents. Stacked in filing cabinets, scanned and forgotten in shared drives, packed into tax folders and mortgage packets – largely ignored!

Did I deliberately Marie Kondo the document legacy?  I am making amends in this newsletter. Colin Coleman and I conducted a workshop on “Data and Information Management: Pillars of AI Strategy Execution” at the AIIM 2025 conference.  I met with a number of Intelligent Document processing (IDP) associated professionals and practitioners.  I am sharing some of my learnings and reflections.

With Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), the oldest source of data is becoming the newest frontier in AI-powered insight.

Lesson from the Field

"Documents are where the business logic lives. Unlock them, and you unlock enterprise intelligence.”— Petra Beck, Infosource

🗃️ From Paper to Potential: IDP in Action

 IDP refers to the process of extracting meaningful and accurate usable information that can be organized and accessible for delivering business outcomes. I watched, not my normal copiers, in action. IDP hardware, used several AI techniques to recreate the print lost in a paper tear, numbers lost in fading invoices, and misshapen letters from crumpled and creased papers, and build a clear and accurate final image.

Just like digital Big data, documents represent unstructured legacy Big data.

We have millions of documents stored in our repository, but it’s almost impossible to get the right answer without a lot of manual content search. – IBM Client* (Matt Vest Presenter at AIIM2025)

Here are some use cases presented by Brent Wesler Vital Records Control (VRC), that show the manifestations of the giant challenge – they sound trivial, but when you are talking of 1000s of such documents being generated, the effort gets multiplied exponentially!

🏦 Financial Services

Problem: Manual separation and entry of inconsistent bailee letters – formats, language, structure of the letters vary with new sellers, type of mortgages, or style used by the issuers. Solution: IDP tools powered by AI now classify, extract, and validate data directly into Loan Management Systems — even when formatting and punctuation are missing.

☀️ Solar Energy

Problem: Managing field tech images, diagrams, work orders and notes on solar installations, sharing information across teams and no offline access to upload photos and files. Solution: Document AI makes these accessible and searchable, enabling smoother ops and project handoffs.

Tip to Go If your business depends on scanning, sharing, or referencing legacy docs, start tagging now. Metadata is your new filing cabinet.

Lesson from the Field “We need AI to create data of quality that can be used to train AI models.” — AIIM 2025 presenter Rohan Vaidyanathan

🔍 Trends That Make IDP More Than OCR

📊 $7.7B global investment in IDP expected this year

📈 78% of enterprises expect GenAI ROI within 1–3 years

🧠 LLMs are now being used for document summarization, classification, and real-time lookup

Lesson from the Field “AI is finally doing what document scanners dreamed of: making meaning, not just images.” — Priya!!

🔁 A Dual Loop of Value

With IDP, your old data isn’t just being accessed, it’s now part of your future. Use historical documents to train and improve LLMs. Then use LLMs to make those same documents useful again.

Lesson from the Field “The same data that’s locked in paper is the very data we now need to train and trust our AI models.” — Chris McNulty, Synozur

⛵ Finally @ Chris McNulty, Synozur gave a visual to track your journey with AI initiatives for IDP.

 Finally, our workshop ‘AI for Business Leaders’ is fast approaching!

Facilitators: Dr Beverly Wright (CAO Wavicle/Exec Program Director UGA), Sam Krishnamurthy (CTO Turvi) and Dr. Priya Sarathy (CEO Wheel Data Strategies)

Information session: https://youtu.be/1ssZPQpaO3I

May 12th, Early Bird registration EB15 will expire by April 15th.

Register at https://www.wheelds.com/service-page/ai-for-business-leaders

#AIIM2025 #PetraBeck #ChrisMcNulty, #Synozur, #IDP #DocumentIntelligence #AI #GenAI

#AI4BL