Why Smart Businesses Are Shifting to AI and OCR for Data Extraction: 8 Compelling Reasons

You no longer need to rely on manual data entry for document extraction and analysis. Instead, harness the power of artificial intelligence to streamline your document-handling process like never before alongside the OCR. 

In this article, we'll delve into the 8 advantages of automating document extraction using AI and OCR.

What is AI and OCR Document Extraction?

AI and OCR document extraction uses artificial intelligence to manage information from digital documents. It can process, classify, extract, and store data. Conventional document extraction and analysis uses manual workflows, human interventions, and predefined rules. This is different. Below are the key features and significance of related AI document extraction tools:

• They can manage several document types, such as forms, contracts, invoices, and resumes. Thus, they can understand the content and layout of each.
• They find essential details in documents, like key-value pairs, entities, tables, and images. And store them in a structured format for easy access and analysis.
• The tools get better with user feedback, becoming more accurate and performing better as time passes by.
• Document processing is faster, cheaper, and more accurate.
• Using them allows for improved collaboration, communication, and customer service. This is because they provide faster and more accurate access to document information.

8 reasons for Businesses to employ AI and OCR for Document Extraction

1. Enhanced Accuracy and Efficiency

Using AI and OCR for data extraction can improve the accuracy and efficiency of document processing. They remove the need for people to do it by hand and reduce mistakes like losing or identifying text/numbers/handwriting wrong.
Besides, an AI system can gather important information from documents and turn it into organized data for analysis. For instance, OCR can extract essential invoice details, like the vendor's name, amount, date, and payment terms. An AI system can then put these details into a database or accounting software. Manual data entry and verification consume time and resources, but this saves them.

Did you Know!

An AI system can also optimize resources like storage and bandwidth for paperwork tasks. For example, it could compress or archive less used documents to save space and speed. It can add or remove computing power as needed, too. This prevents overpaying or underusing what you already have.

PairSoft is a company that provides AI-driven document automation solutions. PairSoft helped Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative, a global manufacturing company, automate its accounts payable process by using its AI technology to capture data from invoices and match them with purchase orders and receipts. This resulted in a 90% reduction in invoice processing time and a 75% reduction in invoice processing costs.

One company called SoftKraft helped an insurance firm cut costs and staffing for paperwork with their intelligent document processing tool. It automated the extracting and processing data from unstructured documents, such as claims and policies, so it synced up with their central systems. This reduced manual errors, improved data quality, and increased productivity.

2. Augmented Security and Data Privacy

An AI system can use cognitive computing techniques to find sensitive document information. It can then apply security measures like encryption or redaction. This helps prevent unauthorized access, leakage, or misuse of data.

Additionally, an AI system can watch users' behavior and detect any unusual or suspicious activity. An AI system can notify the administrator if a user tries to access irrelevant documents or downloads/shares many at once. This helps prevent data breaches and ensure compliance with data protection regulations.

Adobe offers AI-powered document management solutions. Adobe helped a global law firm improve its document security and privacy by using its Adobe Sensei technology to automatically classify documents based on their sensitivity level and apply encryption and watermarking accordingly. This helped the firm protect its clients' data and follow GDPR requirements.

3. Optimized Workflow and Collaboration

Businesses can use AI-powered systems like RPA or chatbots to automate repetitive tasks. This includes routing documents for approval, sending reminders or notifications, and answering FAQs. This frees up human workers to focus on more creative or strategic tasks that need human judgment or expertise.

An AI system can help workers collaborate by sharing and creating documents efficiently. For example, an AI and OCR system can provide suggestions or feedback on document content, such as grammar, tone, style, or clarity. It can also enable real-time communication and editing among many users who work on the same document. This improves the quality and consistency of documents and enhances teamwork and productivity.

Microsoft also provides AI-enhanced document management solutions. The company helped the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) implement a fully automated electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) on SharePoint using AI and machine learning. The system enabled the AHRC to automate document creation, classification, retention, disposal, and reporting processes. It also enabled the AHRC staff to collaborate more effectively on documents using Microsoft Teams.

4. Smart Search Capabilities

One super advantage of artificial intelligence managing documents is it can make finding stuff easier. An AI system can understand people and questions better by using natural language processing. It can find the real meaning of words and essential phrases extracted by OCR and provide better answers.

It could even rank results by importance, popularity, or newness. Plus, an AI could let users search by talking, uploading a pic of the paper they need, or typing a usual question. So, hunting down documents becomes smoother and faster.

Google helped a vast consulting firm improve searches through its Document AI. This lets the company take in all kinds of paperwork like proposals and reports and pull out critical data. Then, staff could ask questions in plain English to find the correct info.

5. Improved Regulatory Compliance

Another big plus is AI can help companies follow all those pesky rules and regulations around documents. Businesses can stay compliant and avoid fines or lawsuits by automatically applying security and privacy rules. They can also enforce retention and deletion policies and perform regular audits.

An AI system can also monitor how well companies are doing on compliance and send reports on the status of regulated documents. It can warn users about issues that need fixing to keep things transparent and accountable. This oversight helps businesses keep their paperwork practices on the straight and narrow.

IBM Watson Discovery assisted Pfizer in regulatory submissions for new treatments and trials. It could analyze a gazillion clinical trials and R&D documents to pull out and organize the info needed for regulators. This sped up their product launches while lowering compliance risks.

6. Informed Decision-Making

AI and OCR can also allow better choices based on what's in your documents and data. By reviewing historical info and extracting key details, an AI system can serve up recommendations and predictions about sales, customer feedback, new opportunities, and more.

It can also give users interactive tools to explore the data through conversational searches, voice commands, sharing insights with others, and more. So, the information is more accessible, and decision-making gets a boost.

Salesforce Einstein Discovery can help e-commerce firms make more intelligent choices by reviewing invoices, orders, returns, reviews, and so on to generate data-driven recommendations about pricing, inventory, marketing, customer service, and other operations.

7. Improving Customer Experience

Don't forget AI can improve customer service, too, by making your paperwork and data work for your clients! It can generate customized proposals, contracts, invoices, and so on tailored to each customer. AI can also distribute documents through their preferred channels like email or text.

It can even handle customer service through chatbots that access document info to answer questions. Sentiment analysis allows the AI to detect mood and tone so it can respond appropriately to customers.

8. Future-Proofing Your Systems

Lastly, AI and OCR document management can help you stay cutting-edge. The AI continuously learns from your files and adapts to new needs, so you don't get stuck with outdated processes. It can also develop new content or improvements by using creative algorithms and your existing documents.

OpenAI's GPT models help ad agencies create new, high-quality copywriting using only a few keywords. It could explore different writing styles and formats to create new possibilities for their paperwork.

How to Extract Business Card(s) Data

Even in this age, employees use physical cards to share their business contact information even though there are tools such as Email Signature Generator to create digital signatures and contacts.

Business card data extraction tools such as Card Scanner help extract the contact data from the business cards and store them in digital format for easier access. Cardscanner supports multiple languages and detects the language automatically with the help of tools such as this.

Wrapping Up

AI and OCR document extraction streamlines workflows, enhances security, lowers costs, improves compliance, boosts productivity, and future-proofs systems. By leveraging them to automate repetitive tasks, extract data, apply analytics, and generate insights, businesses can transform their document handling. The time for paper-based processes is over. Embrace AI-powered solutions today to maximize efficiency and unlock the full value of your documents.