The first month of 2023 has passed, and the world is obsessed with ChatGPT and the endless opportunities the application brings with it. ChatGPT is the part of a bigger story spread over the decades and still unfolding. Artificial Intelligence is too real now, and changing the way we look at the world and work.
One such story is document digitization in different businesses. Lending, Insurance, Law, Healthcare, Supply-chain management, Hospitality – no industry is untouched by the powerful effects of automated document data extraction. The total size of the automated document capture market stood at 8.7 billion which is growing at a CAGR of 29.7% currently. Intelligent document processing (IDP) takes the chunk of it making 63.6% of the overall market, which is only expected to grow with time.
The reason is simple – Artificial intelligence and machine learning make it possible to capture contextual information from documents and make sense of it just like a human. On the contrary, the template-based and rule-based data capture solutions can recognize the characters in a document, with little training they can identify key-value pairs and line items, differentiate one from the other; but because these solutions are not capable of capturing contextual information that comes with characters identified, they can’t make sense of it.
If I can dare make an analogy – a template-based solution can read a document, but can’t understand.
It simply means that you need humans to review the captured data to ensure its accuracy. Whereas IDP solutions need you to just review exceptions. Less human intervention frees up essential human resources for businesses that can be utilized for much important and humane tasks. That’s the reason, the share of IDP is only going to grow from here because businesses need accurate, timely, and actionable information.
Cloud-based solutions take the chunk amongst all document digitization solutions, making 57.6% of the overall market. Cloud-based solutions cost less and are more accessible making businesses opt for these against in-premise solutions. There are companies that still prefer in-premise document capture solutions because they can’t trust their confidential information on clouds susceptible to all kinds of data breach. However, this ‘trust-gap’ is bridging really fast, as cloud based solutions are going for strict security measures.
Unlike IDP vs template-based solutions, there’s no clear winner here. Both, in-premise and cloud-based solutions will continue to be relevant, however more and more companies will continue to go for cloud-based solutions if their data privacy issues are addressed.
The future of automated data capture technology is likely to involve continued improvements in the accuracy and speed of data extraction, as well as increased integration with other technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. Additionally, there will be a greater emphasis on data security and privacy as more sensitive information is collected and stored electronically. The technology will also be able to handle more and more diverse types of data, such as image and voice, and will be able to extract data from pdf, scanned/non-scanned images, webpages, & social media platforms. Overall, automated data capture technology is on its way to become more sophisticated and widely adopted in various industries.
