Organizations handle a vast volume of documents ranging from finance and accounting to insurance, human resources, sales and marketing, and more. The world has moved a long way from traditional document management systems, which simply involved saving all the files, folders, documents and images in a specific location. Today, document and data processing services leverage artificial intelligence (AI), which has transformed the way documents are processed and managed.
Document processing is the process of creating, inputting, editing and producing texts and documents using computerized systems. However, manually processing and extracting relevant information from digital files such as PDFs, images, videos and spreadsheets is time consuming, difficult, error-prone and costly.
The advent AI changed all that. AI powered document management systems (DMS) process, archive, and analyze information effectively and efficiently with minimal to no human intervention. AI uses deep learning to process documents and automate complex tasks like accounting processes, eliminating repetitive tasks. With AI, facts and figures no longer have to be processed and entered manually.
The key capabilities of AI with regards to document processing are as follows:
- AI automatically gathers information from documents and uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze and understand the content.
- AI extracts data with high accuracy using intelligent document processing (IDP), which seamlessly extracts data from unstructured and semi-structured documents and converts it into structured and usable data.
- Data captured from various documents in varied formats or languages can be further validated and filed automatically.
- AI can process information from thousands of documents in a matter of minutes.
- Document AI can generate forms and enables users to create customized templates for company processes, saving time and boosting productivity.
Benefits of AI-Enabled Document Processing
- Automates Manual Data Processes: Manually processing data requires few tools, but is highly prone to errors and time consuming. Storing, managing, and retrieving information in the time of need is a major challenge with manual data processing. AI automates the process, makes it more efficient, improves collaboration, and saves time. Users can find any specific document within a few seconds.
- Unlocks the value of data: AI can release the full extent of an organization’s data. As AI has the ability to analyze complex datasets, it can help businesses gain actionable insights from them. This can improve organizations’ predictive capabilities and boost their business agility. Banking is one of the sectors that is benefiting from AI-backed processes on a large scale. AI has revolutionized processing forms for all sorts of accounts and cut down processing time for data-dependent tasks like loan requests.
- Streamlines document management: AI tools can identify, label and organize key data and group files by type, allowing authorized applications and users to access them efficiently. This eliminates the need for manual review. Users can find the exact information they need in the future in the proper locations.
- Supports data extraction: OCR converts scanned documents into text-based files, allowing users to edit, format, and search the document quickly. AI-supported OCR can extract data directly from documents by automatically pulling insights from the text, understanding its context, processing the document content more effectively, and taking action based on this information. As pairsoft.com explains, an AI-powered DMS can be trained to recognize invoices and forward them to other staff by automatically processing vendor names, line items, invoice numbers, etc.
- Document clustering: Automatic document organization, information retrieval and filtering require document clustering to be done quickly and accurately. Document clustering is used in data analysis and mining, image analysis, data compression, and information retrieval. It involves segregating documents based on their content. The documents are analyzed based on a cluster of similar words, phrases, and sentences. When there is a large amount of data, ML can ease the process of extracting the relevant information.
- Enhances the customer experience: Applying ML to examine emails, reviews and other forms of customer interactions and help business understand their sentiments and predict customer behavior. Sales, marketing and customer support can use information to enhance customers’ shopping experiences.
- Supports HR processes: When AI is applied to internal process documents, it can assess employee productivity and reveal patterns in each employee’s performance to provide actionable insights. Likewise, an AI based document management system supports the hiring process by eliminating the need for manual reviewing of resumes. AI can sort resumes based on specific keywords, so that HR managers can get the exact information they require.
Document management issues can compromise productivity and impact customer service. AI-backed document management systems mean higher productivity, more agile processes, improved security, smarter data-driven decisions, and lower costs. However, accurate data is essential for leveraging AI, analytics and machine learning tools. Outsourced solutions can help businesses ensure accurate data and get their data infrastructure ready for the best utilization of AI document management and processing.
