Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
The automated capture, classification and extraction of data from documents such as invoices, contracts and forms using OCR and AI models.
IDP cuts manual data entry in finance, insurance, logistics and HR, speeding up processing and reducing keying errors, which makes document-heavy back-office work cheaper to scale.
An accounts payable team sends supplier invoices to a prebuilt invoice model, auto-posts those with every field above 90% confidence and a matching purchase order to the ERP, and routes the rest to a reviewer queue.
Accuracy drops with poor scans, handwriting and unusual layouts, so a human review step is still needed for low-confidence fields. Custom models need labeled samples, and processing personal data in documents brings GDPR obligations.
A typical pipeline ingests files, applies optical character recognition and layout analysis, classifies the document type, extracts fields and tables with prebuilt or custom models, and validates values against formats and business rules. Named Entity Recognition (NER) identifies names, dates and amounts. The output, often JSON, feeds ERP or CRM systems, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) or workflow tools handle downstream steps and exceptions.
Data Engineering
IBM — What is intelligent document processing? — https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/intelligent-document-processing; Microsoft Learn — What is Azure Document Intelligence? — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/document-intelligence/overview
