What is intelligent document processing?

Why is intelligent document processing important?

Organizations deal with more inbound content than ever, comprised of many formats, such as PDFs, emails with attachments, mobile images, and more. Processing files manually takes time, costs money, and often leads to mistakes.

Files such as invoices, sales orders, customer communications, and employee records contain valuable information, but without the ability to find, understand, and act upon the data within, important workflows are delayed. Too often, the burden of effectively using content falls on individuals, with extra steps required to manually review content, add tags, and manage content-intensive workflows.

In response, organizations across all industries are replacing manual data entry and file tagging with intelligent document processing solutions. By automating document capture, classification, processing, and data extraction, manual tasks are reduced, freeing up employees and teams for higher-value work, reducing errors, and improving data utilization.

Intelligent data processing enables organizations to expand information capture with the latest AI technologies and business process automation tools to accelerate revenue workflows and create better customer and employee experiences. When organizations optimize automation, everything moves faster and more consistently, which is vital to remain competitive and compliant.

How does intelligent document processing work?

Intelligent document processing accelerates downstream workflows to increase efficiency and productivity through three core stages:

1. Information capture: Intelligent document processing collects content from various sources, such as emails and mobile apps, automatically tagging and organizing documents.
2. AI-powered data extraction and document understanding: AI helps intelligent document processing solutions understand what’s in a document, pulling out key details, recognizing patterns, and understanding tone and sentiment. Plus, the AI model learns over time, continuously improving results and performance.
3. Workflow automation: Once data is extracted, the intelligent document processing solution sends the data to the right place to trigger workflows, such as within a finance system, HR tool, or customer service platform. This automation saves time and reduces the risk of errors.

What are common intelligent document processing use cases?

Intelligent document processing solutions are ideal for files that need to be organized, searched, and acted upon quickly. That makes intelligent document processing a critical tool in bringing new efficiencies to many industries and critical business functions. Some examples include:

• Finance: Automate invoice and payments.
• Healthcare: Digitize patient records.
• Government: Speed up licensing and permits.
• HR: Make onboarding quicker and easier.
• Insurance: Process claims faster with fewer errors.
• Customer onboarding: Automate ID and address verification.
• Customer service: Route requests and respond faster.
• Compliance: Organize and protect regulatory documents.

Here’s an example of a common customer onboarding scenario: applying for a bank account. To verify the customer’s identity, the person uploads a PDF with a utility bill, a rental agreement, and a scanned driver’s license. Behind the scenes, an intelligent document processing solution like OpenText™ Capture goes to work. It automatically separates the three documents, classifies each one, and extracts key data, such as name, address, and account numbers. If any information is missing or unclear, the system flags it for quick human review using a simple web interface. After the intelligent document capture is complete, the IDP solution automatically exports files and metadata to the bank’s system, triggering the next workflow in the customer onboarding process.

What are the primary advantages of an intelligent document processing solution?

Intelligent document processing maximizes efficiency with information capture, AI, and process automation. Customers and employees benefit from faster onboarding and case resolution—even the tone of a customer communication can trigger who the system assigns to a support ticket. Both groups also experience less frustration stemming from manual tasks and lost documents.

No matter how information comes into an organization, the content is immediately transformed to make it usable and searchable. It feeds automated business processes, removing the burden from the user to manually review content, add tags, and decide whether to kick off the next workflow.

As a result, organizations benefit from:

• New levels of speed and efficiency: Intelligent document processing reduces the time needed to process documents, automating manual work and reducing delays in critical processes.
• Increased accuracy: Automated data extraction minimizes errors, ensuring accurate capture of information.
• Greater customer satisfaction: Faster response times and more personalized interactions fueled by accurate data leads to higher customer satisfaction and retention rates.
• Cost savings: By reducing manual work, intelligent document processing solutions lower operational costs and improve overall efficiency.
• Tight compliance and information governance: Automatic document classification, filing, and archiving across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured content simplifies compliance.

How can OpenText help you with intelligent document processing?

OpenText offers complete intelligent document processing solutions through OpenText™ Content Cloud, which combines intelligent capture, AI-powered automation, and deep integration with enterprise systems to help organizations work smarter and faster.

Unlike point solutions that only handle one part of the document lifecycle, OpenText provides end-to-end capabilities—from document ingestion and classification to data extraction, workflow automation, and secure archiving. This unified approach reduces complexity, improves accuracy, and speeds up time to value.

Here’s what sets OpenText apart:

• One vendor for everything: OpenText delivers capture, IDP, content services, archiving, and analytics in a single solution. This eliminates the need to manage multiple vendors or disconnected tools.
• AI-powered automation: OpenText uses machine learning and large language models to continuously improve data extraction, classification, and workflow decisions. This reduces manual review and increases accuracy over time.
• Deep integrations: OpenText integrates natively with systems like SAP and Salesforce, making it easier to embed IDP into existing business processes without custom development.
• Flexible deployment: Whether you need SaaS, private cloud, hybrid, or on-premises deployment, OpenText supports your strategy. You can move to the cloud at your own pace and with your preferred hyperscaler—Google® Cloud, AWS™, or Microsoft® Azure™.
• Global scale and support: With operations in 180 countries and over 23,000 employees, OpenText provides the scale and expertise to support complex, global deployments.

With OpenText, organizations reduce manual work, improve data quality, and accelerate digital transformation, while maintaining control over their content and workflows.

Discover why organizations choose OpenText for intelligent document processing