How Is AI Revolutionizing Document Processing and Automation?

AI is a transformative force reshaping how businesses use technology across various applications, including intelligent document processing (IDP).

Generali, a leading global insurance company, reduced costs, boosted productivity and improved employee morale by deploying AI technologies to extract information from handwritten and digital forms in multiple formats.

Acentra Health, a healthcare solution provider, saved 11,000 nursing hours in six months by developing an application that uses AI to draft letters for Medicare quick appeal decisions.

These examples show that businesses across all industries can benefit from AI-powered IDP. This article will cover the benefits and challenges of AI-powered document automation, real-world applications, and how you can use Docupilot's AI capabilities to streamline document processing.

AI in Document Automation

Before the advent of AI, IDP was limited to data extraction from structured documents using optical character recognition (OCR). However, it could not deal with unstructured documents or adapt to new types of documents.

With AI and associated technologies, including machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), IDP can now extract, analyze, and organize data from structured and unstructured documents.

In addition to processing existing documents, AI-powered systems like Docupilot's AI-powered template builder can also participate in document creation.

What Are the Key Benefits of AI-Powered Document Automation?

AI-powered document automation offers numerous benefits for businesses of all sizes.

AI turns hours of manual document work into minutes

Businesses in the legal, real-estate, finance, healthcare, and other sectors handle thousands of documents daily, in different formats and languages. Many of these forms include handwritten data, which legacy systems struggle to process, making manual data entry a necessary but time-consuming step.

AI-powered automation systems can not only deal with documents in different formats and languages, but they can also learn to recognize human handwriting. These systems can also handle documents at scale, saving thousands of hours in the process. 

Businesses can achieve significant cost savings by deploying AI-based automation systems and allocating freed-up resources to tasks that AI can't currently handle.

AI-driven processing improves reliability by eliminating manual inconsistencies

Typos, missed fields, and inconsistencies are common pitfalls of manual document processing. AI-powered systems significantly reduce these errors and improve accuracy over time through continuous learning and feedback. The result is consistent data extraction and analysis, no matter when or where it's performed.

Workflow efficiency improves multifold with AI-powered document intelligence

AI-based intelligent document automation systems can increase workflow efficiency multifold by:

• Automating repetitive tasks like sorting documents, data entry, and data validation
• Passing extracted data to downstream systems
• Initiating workflows based on pre-defined triggers

How Does AI Transform Modern Document Workflows?

Generative AI is transforming automation and playing an ever-increasing role in modern document workflows.

Document creation and drafting

Manual document creation is a time-consuming and resource-intensive activity. Especially, when documents, such as contracts, run to hundreds of pages, require input from multiple teams and departments, and require multiple rounds of review.

Generative AI simplifies this process by creating business documents such as contracts, letters, reports, or proposals from well-defined prompts. For example, a legal team can input details of an upcoming deal, and generative AI will create a full contract document. This still requires human document review, but the time required for the initial draft will be cut from hundreds of man-hours to a few minutes.

Dynamic template generation

Templates are a go-to tool for speeding up document creation and enhancing efficiency. Static templates (e.g. forms with blank fields) and dynamic templates (that adjust content based on input data or rules) have been around for a long time.

Generative AI enhances the flexibility of dynamic templates and significantly accelerates their creation. Unlike traditional templates that rely on hard-coded “if/else” rules, AI can intelligently include or exclude content based on contextual understanding, reducing the time and effort spent on manual configurations. 

Data extraction and classification

Traditional systems rely on Optical Character Recognition (OCT) to extract data from structured documents. These systems require manual configuration for new formats and cannot scale to accommodate different formats and document types. Modern systems use Generative AI to overcome these issues. Gen AI can understand the semantic meanings and deal with unstructured data in multiple languages.

Traditional systems classify files and data based on filenames and/or manual tags. Gen-AI powered systems can classify files and data based on content. For example, these systems can differentiate between a scanned copy of a sales contract and a medical prescription.

In addition to data extraction and document classification, AI can analyze data, flag anomalies, and suggest actions, further reducing the need for manual intervention and improving efficiency.

Real-World Applications of AI in Document Automation

Now let’s review a few illustrative examples of how AI-driven document automation is transforming business.

Use case: Finance and banking

Invoice and receipt processing, loan application review, and Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance are some of the key applications for AI document automation in the finance and banking sector.

Real-life example: JPMorgan Chase's Contract Intelligence (COIN) platform interprets commercial loan agreements, reducing 360,000 annual man-hours spent reviewing 12,000 agreements to mere minutes.

Use case: Legal

Contract analysis, eDiscovery, and compliance checks required extensive manual effort. Now, AI-based processing can deliver results in seconds.

Real-life example: Paralegals and legal assistants at Acumen Law were spending 60 to 90 minutes daily and over 120 hours per week on manually processing thousands of documents. Implementing an AI-based IDP solution enabled staff at the firm to allocate an additional 100+ hours each week to high-value tasks and serving clients.

Use case: Healthcare

Patient intake forms, claims processing, and records management are everyday activities that consume valuable time that could be better spent helping patients. AI is now helping to ensure just that.

Real-life example: At the University of Kansas Health System, physicians were spending more than 2 hours outside of work on documentation. An AI-based medical transcription solution now reduces this time to minutes by converting the physician-patient discussion into text, summarizing it in the preferred format, editing it, and integrating it with other software for documentation purposes.

Overcoming Common Challenges in AI Document Automation

While AI offers significant advantages for document automation, it also presents several challenges. Below are some of the most common issues businesses face today.

Cost and resource constraints related to AI training

The cost of training AI models runs into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. Smaller businesses may lack the budgetary and human resources required for this training.

Security of data processed by AI systems

Approximately 420 million data records were leaked due to data breaches in the third quarter of 2024. Cybersecurity is rightfully a major concern for all businesses, especially those entrusted with confidential customer data.

AI systems are trained on large datasets that often include personal and sensitive information, and ensuring data security remains an ongoing concern, requiring effective safety measures.

Integration of modern AI-based systems with legacy systems

The integration of AI-based systems with legacy systems is not straightforward, as the process is resource-intensive, time-consuming, and costly.

The Future of AI in Document Automation

AI is a rapidly evolving technology. As models become smarter and more context-aware, we will begin to see further improvements in AI-powered document automation, including:

• Better understanding of context and meaning will improve the accuracy of data extraction and decision-making
• Domain-specific custom AI agents will take over many document-related tasks that currently require expert intervention
• Multilingual capabilities will allow global businesses to reduce the required time and costs of localization

How Docupilot Uses AI to Streamline Document Workflows

Docupilot is an online platform that allows you to create a wide range of business documents, including contracts, proposals, invoices, quotes, and more.

Docupilot is a cost-effective and user-friendly platform that has recently become even easier to use with its AI Template Builder. To create a document, just follow the process outlined below.

Step #1: Login

Use your credentials to log in to Docupilot.

Step #2: Create a template

Once logged in, you can either work on existing documents or create templates. 

For templates, you can start from scratch, upload existing templates in PDF or Word formats, or use the AI builder.

Click on the "Create Template" button on the top right, followed by the "Build with AI" button.

Add a name and description for the template, then click "Create Template" at the bottom left.

Step #3: Enter a prompt

AI will suggest prompts based on the name and description of your document. You can use suggested prompts or enter a custom prompt.

Step #4: Review the template

Within seconds, the AI will create the template, which you can edit or use as is.

Conclusion

Legacy intelligent document processing enables the use of computer-based technologies for data extraction, reducing manual intervention and improving processing speed and efficiency.

The application of AI and related technologies to IDP has opened up new avenues and applications, with further advancements expected as AI continues to evolve and improve.

Docupilot is a powerful SaaS-based document automation platform. It is affordable and feature-rich, with its AI capabilities enhancing user-friendliness and effectiveness.

Sign up today to harness the power of AI and streamline document creation at scale.