How AI Is Revolutionizing Document Capture: A More Accurate, Time, and Cost-Efficient Approach

Once the stuff of science fiction, artificial intelligence is making waves as new technological breakthroughs and use cases emerge rapidly. The intelligent information management industry is no exception to these adaptations as the technology is revolutionizing how information from paper, PDFs, and other computer-illegible sources can be read and leveraged for automation, eliminating templates and expediting your return on investment.

How It Works

The Trouble with Templates

Optical character recognition is nothing new, but the way it was applied in the past required that each captured field be mapped to a ‘document template.’ This meant that any variation in a document’s format required a new template, which is time-consuming and costly to build and maintain.

Image Transformation with AI

When artificial intelligence is introduced to the capture process, accurate document capture without templates not only becomes possible but also a reality. Allowing AI to make decisions about the context of the fields within a document surpasses templated capture in every way. 

AI Capture: The Best of Both Worlds

The convenience, cost, and time efficiency of AI document capture solutions far exceed those of their templated counterparts, and the best part is that the results are even more accurate. There is no tradeoff. You can actually have your cake and eat it, too. Below, we go a little more in-depth with each of the benefits of AI in document capture.

Convenient Setup

Capture templates are time-consuming to create and test, often taking up to 4 hours of work for just one. For a process like invoice automation, where each vendor sending an invoice may require a different template, this can complicate or even sink an investment as the number of paid hours eclipses the estimated investment cost and prevents you from taking advantage of your solution. For example, an organization with 500 active vendors may require 2000 hours of template creation before the solution is fully operational.

For document capture and invoice automation with AI, this time-heavy initial setup is completely sidestepped with a highly accurate, fully operational capture solution available in a fraction of the time.

Saved Time

AI capture solutions continue to save time for most organizations well after initial setup, though. Minor changes to documents can lead to major changes in capture accuracy for template-based systems. This can be especially problematic for documents for which you have no control over the formatting, like vendor invoices. With decreased accuracy comes either more error corrections or more template design, both of which are time sinks a solution like this is meant to prevent.

AI capture remains consistently accurate regardless of changes to invoices as it learns and adapts to each document based on context and feedback. This ensures your employees can focus on their roles instead of worrying about correcting errors or revising templates.

Reduced Costs

All this additional time saved puts more hours in your organization’s day for mission-centric tasks that generate value and revenue. With less time spent fiddling with error-prone software and more time creating value for your organization, cost efficiency will naturally rise. For organizations without an in-house template expert, this can lead to even more savings as they will no longer have to outsource the design and editing of templates to an outside vendor.

Increased Accuracy

All of this cost and time efficiency comes without a tradeoff, as the quality of the data output by AI capture solutions is far more accurate than any template-based solution. The adaptability and decision-making capabilities of AI software ensure that these solutions look at the document holistically and make assumptions about the data they are extracting. If a decimal place looks off or a digit doesn’t make sense, it will correct it based on what seems plausible. For Square 9’s TransformAI solution, this has resulted in a near 100% accuracy rate.

In Summary

With time and professional services costs saved on template design during solution setup and beyond, AI-assisted capture can create a more efficient workplace while improving data accuracy. These savings and accuracy improvements ultimately lead to an improved bottom line and customer service, reduced churn, more reliable decision-making, and better visibility on crucial information.

How Square 9 Can Help

Square 9 is an AI-powered intelligent information management platform that takes the paper out of work and makes it easier to get things done with digital workflows that automate many aspects of how you work today. We make it easy by extracting information from scans or PDFs, storing documents in a searchable archive, and building digital twins of your current processes through graphical workflows.