Featured Article from Appian, a CIPS Corporate Partner
From employee onboarding to invoice processing, chances are your organization has many workflows that include documents. To perform your business activity, the data contained in these documents (unstructured data) has to be extracted and structured. Many companies do this today without the use of automation by manually performing data entry that is slow and expensive. When companies do use automation, they use optical character recognition (OCR) which requires time-consuming setup and maintenance to accommodate for variations in document formats. There is a better way to solve this problem: using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Using AI for document-centric business processes at enterprise-scale requires:
- Classifying incoming documents and extracting data from documents with high accuracy without specialized AI experts.
- Bringing people in the loop when the AI model predictions are not confident enough and using the input from people to further improve the accuracy of classification and extraction.
- A high-productivity user interface to validate and reconcile the information extracted using the AI model.
- The ability to incorporate document extraction into upstream or downstream business processes.
We built Appian’s Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) to address all of these requirements and more. Here is a diagram to help you visualize how this works.
