What is OCR and document AI?
OCR turns pixels into characters. Document AI decides what those characters mean, checks them against what the business already knows, and flags what disagrees. Buying the first and expecting the second is the most common disappointment in this category.
OCR has been a solved problem on clean print for a long time, which is why it is cheap and why it is often quoted as though it were the whole job. It is not. A supplier invoice read perfectly into text is still unusable until somebody has identified which number is the net, matched the line items to a purchase order and a delivery note, and decided whether a discrepancy is a rounding difference or a problem.
The second difference is honesty about input quality. Extraction accuracy is not one number: on one paper archive it split 96% on clean digital forms, 84% on poor scans and 61% on handwritten entries, and 14% of fields were routed to a person with the region of the page they came from. A single averaged accuracy figure for document extraction means the vendor has either not measured across real inputs or has chosen not to say.
| On this | OCR and document AI | OCR on its own |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | Validated fields, and a flag on what disagrees | Text, which somebody still has to interpret |
| Who checks it | The system, against the purchase order and the delivery note | The same person as before, slightly faster |
| Accuracy claim to expect | A split by input quality, plus what happens to the uncertain remainder | One number, usually measured on clean print |
- When it is the right answer
- When a quote for document processing looks surprisingly cheap. Ask what it does after the text comes out.
- The service line that delivers this
- AI Document Intelligence
Four thousand supplier invoices a month, and three people typing them into the ERP. Month-end waits for them.
Start here
If a term here is the one your board paper turns on, ask us about it.
We will send the entry, the evidence behind it, and the honest note about where it does not apply.
You get a reply within one working day, from the engineer who would do the work - not a sales sequence.