Intelligent document processing delivers on the promise of AI

You can’t visit a news site without coming face to face with an alarming article about the formidable power of artificial intelligence (AI). With the ability to ingest and analyze vast amounts of information, tools like generative AI promise to take over vast quantities of work, putting in jeopardy the jobs of millions of employees worldwide. But like all powerful tools throughout human history, AI is just as likely to open up new horizons of creative endeavor by taking over tedious and repetitive tasks.

One of the AI-based technologies that holds the most potential for empowering workers in this way is intelligent document processing (IDP). IDP harnesses computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, and other branches of AI to streamline workflows and accelerate the ability to gain insights from data. IDP tools perform time-consuming drudge work of classifying documents, extracting key attributes and creating structured output , thereby enabling employees to be more efficient and innovative.

Here’s how IDP works:

• Ingestion – digitizing paper documents and importing them into the system using AI-aided optical character recognition (OCR) tools.
• Classification – identifying the language of the document and the data it contains using natural language processing (NLP) tools.
• Intelligent document splitting – automatically separating multi-page documents into logical sections or individual documents based on content, layout, or predefined rules
• Data extraction – transforming documents into computer-readable formats, while pulling out information such as dates, names, and financial numbers and storing them in a database or other format.
• Data enrichment – enhancing the extracted data with additional metadata using various methods such as API integrations, database lookups, external data sources, and machine learning algorithms to improve search and analytics.
• Validation – checking the data against relevant data sets and bringing in humans where necessary to spot errors, thereby increasing the efficiency of AI algorithms.
• Insights – integrating the data into workflows and making it available to analytics to improve decision-making.

What can IDP do for you?

IDP today goes far beyond earlier approaches that scanned documents with optical character recognition (OCR) and applied rules to classify and store them. Adding the tremendous power of AI enables the best IDP engines to empower your organization with a broad spectrum of benefits. These include:

• Rapid insights: IDP can cut processing time, increasing the speed of document processing while improving accuracy. This acceleration can provide an essential business edge when handling documents like mortgage applications and insurance claims where customers expect a rapid response.
• Human-in-the-loop (HITL) processing: Human decision-making is essential to handle exceptions that elude the grasp of AI. HITL enlists human participation to train AI algorithms and evaluate output, greatly increasing the effectiveness of the system. When available as a managed service, HITL can reach more organizations than otherwise possible.
• Low code: Because there is not enough time to wait for code to be written and not enough skilled developers to write it, low-code tools are essential for business transformation. Such tools enable business users and subject matter experts to set up IDP systems rapidly and tailor them to the needs of their organization without always relying on technical professionals such as data scientists or software engineers.
• Customized workflows: Because every organization processes documents differently, the ability to create customized workflows and to modify them as needed is a critical productivity enabler. Low-code tools assist teams in developing new ways to complete tasks faster and more accurately, freeing staff to engage in high-value work.
• Industry standards: Solutions developed by advanced IDP providers are the fruit of many engagements across a variety of industries. As a result, they embody industry-standard best practices. Working with an experienced IDP provider enables an organization to benefit from this knowledge rather than develop it on its own.
• Ability to iterate and scale: Manual document processing is inefficient and labor-intensive, making it impractical and expensive to increase scale. And although automation increases efficiency, it does not improve over time. However IDP, powered by algorithms, becomes faster and more accurate the more it is used, steadily increasing its value to the organization.

How to get started

To gain the transformative benefits of IDP, start by taking an inventory of where documents are processed in your organization, including sales, customer service, accounts payable, purchasing, and logistics. Even though IDP might be an immediate fit for one process, it may well be beneficial to a number of different workflows in the future, so consider the possibility for wider deployment over time. And because IDP will not be a separate silo, but part of your overall data strategy, you should provide for integration of IDP output with other systems for additional processing or analysis.

All documents must be protected against hackers, and many documents are subject to compliance with regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Cloud-based IDP solutions must be able retain documents securely and keep sensitive documents in compliance by protecting personally identifiable information. Documents must also be stored in approved geographic regions.

The Iron Mountain edge

Iron Mountain builds on extensive experience from custom engagements with some of the world’s largest companies to create and optimize document and information management workflows for government, healthcare, mortgage and banking, human resources, and contracts. Iron Mountain’s team of AI experts can help implement both standard and customized solutions to automate workflows. As a result, you can reduce the time, effort, cost, and errors involved in document processing while empowering your people to innovate for strategic advantage. For more information, visit ironmountain.com/insight.