Bringing AI into Document Management: How Intelligent Document Processing Brings Huge Potential for Document and Enterprise Content Management

AI, NLP, and IDP are coming to document management sooner than you may realize

The Emergence of AI in Business Applications and Intelligent Document Processing

AI is obviously a hot topic in 2023, especially when it comes to the idea of improving productivity by reducing manual tasks (also known in the tech industry as “toil”). For organizations with document management needs, AI brings great potential with intelligent document processing (IDP).

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is a technology that automates the extraction of data from unstructured documents. This could be shorter documents like invoices and receipts, but can also be leveraged for more complex documents like contracts or other legal documents.

NLP enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language

Natural Language Processing

This is achieved with Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. This is a long way from true intelligence, but it’s still incredibly powerful for analyzing the text in documents and extracting relevant data.

The major benefit is reducing the need for human intervention. It doesn’t eliminate, necessarily, however; a good IDP solution accepts that a person will need to review some results, and provides a mechanism for determining when it’s essential for a knowledge worker to intervene to handle edge cases and other anomalies. But this process of allowing for manual review in a small percentage of situations opens up a larger majority of cases that will not need any human involvement at all. Reducing that involvement not only reduces time and cost, but also reduces human error.

FormKiQ's Upcoming Intelligent Document Processing Module

FormKiQ's Upcoming Intelligent Document Processing Module

At FormKiQ, we are currently working on our first generation of IDP. This involves two main areas:

  1. Classifying documents by type, based on both structure and content
  2. Creating tags based on specific entity types, such as named entities and numeric amounts

Both of these features will be included in our Intelligent Document Processing Module, an add-on for FormKiQ Enterprise. As with other modules, it will deploy into your AWS cloud and will make use of its managed services, in this case relying on Amazon Comprehend.

This functionality will enable faster and more accurate classification and organization of documents, including the ability to create more metadata based on document content to aid in retrieving specific documents or even extracting business intelligence from a large collection of documents.

Eventually, this work in IDP, NLP, and other AI will be included in areas such as document generation, workflows, and integration with other systems, allowing a more streamlined operation within an enterprise content management system. This will enable an AI-enhanced control center for documents and any other organization and customer content, secured and protected both by best practices in security and compliance, and data governance, as well as by FormKiQ being deployed into your organization’s AWS cloud infrastructure, segregated from outside systems. This separation can be extended to the training models used for AI, ensuring that private IP or PII is not leaked for use by outside parties for AI or any other undesired purpose.

Conclusion

While AI, whether as part of intelligent document processing or otherwise, will not replace the need for knowledge workers, we do expect it to add major improvements to document management and for that to happen this year.

And at FormKiQ, we’re using our Intelligent Document Processing Module to focus on making sure that we leverage AI in ways that make sense for our customers and their business.

For more information on our upcoming Intelligent Document Processing module for FormKiQ Enterprise, please contact us or schedule a consultation call.