AI agents that read invoices and contracts. Unstructured data.
The Invisible 80% Barrier
Let's be clear: most companies can automate the easy part—the 20% of their data already ordered in tables and databases. But the real challenge to effective automation lies in the other 80% of information: unstructured data.
We are referring to that endless pile of invoices with variable formats, emails where the client requests something without using templates, and contracts saved in a scanned PDF. This crucial information demands human manual reading and transcription—a process that is slow, extremely costly, and, worse, prone to critical errors.
This is where simple, off-the-shelf automation (RPA) gives up. But the new generation of AI Agents does not. At Altira Automations, we have designed Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solutions that transform this document chaos into measurable efficiency, proving why investing in advanced AI is the real step towards scaling.
The Challenge of Unstructured Information
Dependence on manual document processing creates significant drag on two key areas of the business:
- In financial management: Consider your Accounts Payable department. If you work with 50 suppliers, you will receive 50 different invoice formats. Traditional ERP systems struggle to use standard OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to identify the VAT number, the tax base, or the due date when the format changes. This technology, while evolving, often provides too many false positives because it relies on detecting the font type to understand the content. Consequently, employees must intervene in every document, slowing down payments, complicating audits, and increasing the risk of numerical transcription errors.
- In customer interaction: In sales or support, every email is a different universe. A client might ask for a quotation, a warranty, and a change in the same message. Basic systems fail to interpret the real intent behind the free text, forcing human intervention to classify and prioritize, which invalidates the possibility of 24/7 service and delays key responses.
The challenge is not just the quantity of data, but the variability of its presentation. It's time to give your software the ability to comprehend like a human, but with the speed of a machine.
The power of comprehension: Advanced OCR and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
How do we enable AI Agents to read these documents that appear "illegible" to traditional technology? The answer lies in combining specific Artificial Intelligence technologies:
- Vision with Advanced OCR: This system goes beyond simple image-to-text conversion. Advanced OCR acts as the "eyes" of the AI Agent. It is trained to be resilient to poor scanning quality, distortion, and, most importantly, to identify patterns and key fields (like account numbers or dates) regardless of where they are located on the page.
- Comprehension with Natural Language Processing: Once the text is extracted, Natural Language Processing (NLP) intervenes. NLP is the "brain" of the Agent. It is the technology that allows the system not only to read the words in an email or contract but to interpret their meaning, classify the content, and extract the underlying intent. For example, it differentiates an urgent quote request from a simple stock inquiry.
By integrating these technologies, the AI Agent transforms any input document into clean, structured data, ready to be used by your ERP, CRM, or any internal system, without the need for initial human intervention.
Business impact: Measurable speed and precision
Automating unstructured data is one of the investments with the most direct and significant ROI because it attacks core inefficiency:
- Extreme Process Acceleration: The ability to process large volumes of documents continuously and without human errors results in a reduction of up to 75% in processing time for slow tasks like Accounts Payable management, freeing finance teams from hours of data entry.
- Unprecedented Precision: Advanced data extraction and validation technology elevates reliability. Solutions based on this model routinely achieve a data entry precision rate of 99%, virtually eliminating transcription errors and their associated costs.
- Sustainable Scalability: Your company no longer depends on human processing capacity, allowing for scalability during peak demand or high-volume periods (month-end closes, launches, etc.).
This is the true value of AI Automation: giving your business the ability to process any information with the certainty and speed demanded by today's UK market.
If your teams are paralyzed by the manual reading, classification, and data entry of documents, you are leaving up to 75% of potential efficiency on the table.
At Altira Automations, we transform the illegible into precise and actionable data.
Tired of manual data entry? Let's discuss how NLP can skyrocket your precision.