by Mark Clark, on April 30, 2020 7:06:07 AM PDT
Intelligent Document Processing is an important part of today’s technology landscape. It's drawing increased attention as part of an ecosystem that’s allowing enterprises to move beyond OCR and automate more complex processes. Analysts have floated expectations that IDP will eventually replace OCR, and are paying special attention to both the overall market and the players positioned to move it ahead.
Legacy OCR Can't Turn the Key
That’s in part because OCR can’t access data locked in documents to the level that today’s complex and often unstructured materials require. At the same time, enterprises need to automate more manual processes and have more extraction needs.
IDP is helping enable AI to create value and ultimately, solve business problems. This is an exciting application of AI. But beyond the excitement around the general proposition, enterprises are increasingly putting these technologies to work to be more agile and drive competitive advantage.
The IDP PEAK Matrix Report
Everest Group, which recently released an Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) - Technology Vendor Landscape with Products PEAK Matrix Assessment® 2020, looked at the sector’s current players, their offerings, and trajectories. Everest evaluated IDP players’ market impact, as well as their vision & capability.
“Adoption of IDP solutions can not only help enterprises achieve cost savings, but also improve their workforce productivity and employee & customer experience. These products are also rapidly evolving in the sophistication of their capabilities, features, and functionalities,” Everest notes in its report.
IDP Supports Digital Transformation
Here's why: IDP is operating in the service of broader digital transformation. IDP is part of enterprises’ automation strategies, which puts it in arena enterprises and experts can’t afford to ignore.
Vendors trying to help firms move beyond automation’s current limits are grouped in the report by market impact, as well as vision & capability. The vendors with a long history in the market are adding AI into their offerings, which were originally developed to address a different set of needs, in a less digitized marketplace.
That’s because the first problem was capturing data.
The Old Guard and the Innovators
In the last few decades, more sophisticated asks have emerged alongside the demand for digitization. To be competitive, enterprises have to be able to classify and extract data with incredible speed and accuracy, in a way that’s easy to scale as their data intake and analysis needs grow.
As the market’s needs evolved, a set of new players emerged. This set of enterprises, many grouped in Everest’s report under the category of “major contenders”, are using AI-native platforms to address the challenge of bringing mature industries’ data online, and making sure new businesses can access and analyze data with speed and accuracy.
This is a good moment for it. Firms are now looking not just at AI projects and initiatives, but also re-imagining the role AI can play in reshaping their business models for exponential improvement.
The Next Frontier
Around the world, enterprises are looking for similar services to enhance their business strategies. They want the services to be easy to deploy and well-supported. Having strong capabilities is one key to serving them well. Being able to add new use cases, new data feeds, perform corrections and handle a variety of unstructured documents, such as graphs, stamps, and handwritten documents are at the cutting edge of what IDP can do. Not surprisingly, the IDP market is expected to grow rapidly over the next several years.
The next frontier is syncing IDP with AI capabilities to automate more, make better decisions, create a competitive advantage, and revolutionize the customer experience.
AI is opening up new possibilities for automation, as businesses rush to digitally transform their operations and business models to not be left behind. IDP allows them to broaden the scope of that automation by making sure their data is clean, accessible, and valuable.
