Need help with paperwork?

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Yesterday, Google Cloud released the Document AI Platform, which should help businesses to extract information from electronic versions of documents using machine learning. Currently the service runs in a preview mode.

Nowadays, a lot of important data from formal papers needs to be reentered manually to some kind of an accounting system. That way we can have an organized database from which we can not only extract valuable information for financial reports, but also apply data mining techniques and learn from the company’s data about different trends. Doing such extractions by hand takes workers a lot of valuable time that they could spend on more productive work for the company. An IDC report found out that U.S. companies see a productivity loss of an astounding 21,3% due to paperwork challenges! Moreover, only 18% of companies consider themselves paperless, so 82% of them are in need of such tool. Additionally, they found that $8 billion in total is wasted by all American companies annually on these specific tasks[1].

Document AI Platform is not the first document processing services from Google, but it is probably the most effective yet. It combines Lending DocAI and Procurement DocAI services that work under the same, easy to use dashboard.

The Platform offers managing certain documents without any data mapping or training. These are forms such as W9, 1040, W2, 1099-MISC, 1003 as well as invoices and receipts. The Google Cloud product manager Lewis Liu and product marketing manager Yang Liang claim that there will be more parsing tools added in the future that will help to manage more types of documents.

Google says that this tool helps not only in increasing the speed of data extraction from documents, but also significantly reducing errors that could be made by a human doing the job. The Belgian financial technology firm Unifiedpost managed to increase data capture accuracy by 250% using the service[2]. That’s probably why the platform developers pride themselves on the efficiency of the tool.

The idea of Document AI Platform is so simple in its purpose but can be so effective in saving time and money of many enterprises. It is worth mentioning that Google is not the only company providing such services. Amazon offers Textract and Microsoft has its Form Recogniser. I am wondering, how these competitive tools compare to the Google’s.

 

Bibliography:

Articles I base on and extract data:

  1. Wiggers, Kyle. “Google Launches Document AI Suite of Parsing and Processing Tools in Preview.” VentureBeat, VentureBeat, 4 Nov. 2020, venturebeat.com/2020/11/04/google-launches-document-ai-suite-of-parsing-and-processing-tools-in-preview/.
  2. Team, Editorial. “Unifiedpost and Google Collaborate on Document AI to Automate Procurement Data Capture.” Finextra Research, Finextra, 21 Oct. 2020, www.finextra.com/pressarticle/84600/unifiedpost-and-google-collaborate-on-document-ai-to-automate-procurement-data-capture.

External article:

Deutscher, Maria. “Google Cloud Debuts New Document AI Platform.” SiliconANGLE, 4 Nov. 2020, siliconangle.com/2020/11/04/google-cloud-debuts-new-document-ai-platform/.

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