Say Bye To Manually Going Through Hundreds Of Documents

Every day employees in many organisations have to manually process thousands of incoming documents such as application forms. This is tedious and tiring job prone to human mistakes.  However there is a solution : a intelligent document processing system that uses AI and RPA (robotic process automation) to efficiently and reliably go through the documents.

Nowadays such solutions have become financially feasible – and they reduce a lot of manual work – with employees shifted to do more useful work for the company rather than just spending the day sifting through documents. 

Building An AI Model

Despite the photo accompanying this blog post the “robots” we are speaking about here are not physical robots. They are computer applications that specifically replicate the intelligence human use when reviewing a document and extracting information from it.   

Let’s explore a bit more about these solutions. The following few paragraphs will give you a brief insight into how such solutions work. 

These systems require the “building” of an AI model. An AI model is like a digital brain that learns to do something – in this case recognising the contents of documents.  

Training & Deploying The AI Model

So the for the first step a AI model is trained on a large dataset of labeled documents. Based on the document content and its metadata the AI model learns to determine the type of the document and its contents.

Based on the specific business case you are using the AI model for you can fine tune the model to learn specific things about the content of the document – such as retrieving the date on the document and the names of the persons/products listed.

Once ready the AI model can be deployed and made to be accessible – possibly as an API – where you give it the document as an input and it gives you the type/content/metadata as output.

Using RPA To Automate The Processes Around The AI Model 

This is where an RPA setup can come in. An RPA system can be used to automatically do the following steps for you

1. detect that a new document is present (for example a new email comes with an attachment, or a new file is present in a directory)
2. send that document to the AI model’s API for processing
3. receive the reply from the AI model’s API
4. take the appropriate action based on the reply from the AI model (for example, storing the reply in a database, routing the document to a specific folder, send an email, trigger a workflow, etc.

Intelligent Document Processing

All this falls under what we refer to as “Intelligent Document Processing”. Here is the definition of IDP according to Deloitte (2022) : 

“IDP automates the processing of data contained in documents ― understanding what the document is about, what information it contains, extracting that information, and sending it to the right place.”  

Using the solution described above AI & RPA can help an organisation process its documents promptly and accurately – removing mundane, repetitive, manual-heavy tasks – thus proving a faster, cheaper, better service.