Did you know that an average office worker goes through 10,000 sheets of paper each day?
Fact: Manual document processing is time-consuming, complex to manage and costly to process.
Take an invoice, for example. Even if invoices come from the same supplier, format may vary, typos may occur, and procurement processes may change. This prolongs manual document processing and keeps insights locked forever.
And, we have only scratched the surface. Every company needs to process large amounts of unstructured data every day, from surveys, and tax forms, to employee CVs and legal documents. To make things worse, unstructured data (documents, images and videos) will include almost 80% of data by 2025.
All of this calls for change - an intelligent, easy-to-use, scalable solution that can extract invaluable insights from unstructured documents including facts, graphs, predictions, and relationships.
Why is intelligent document processing important?
AI-powered document processing or intelligent document processing (IDP) enables extraction of meaningful insights from untapped data, allowing businesses to streamline processes, significantly reduce costs and errors, and generate enormous business value.
Nividuos reports that AI-powered IDP processes data 10 times faster than manual methods, all while maintaining an impressive 99.99% accuracy.
One of such solutions is Snowflake Document AI - a type of document intelligence, which dramatically accelerates document processing for efficient data extraction and simplified workflows and processes.
In this blog, we’ll introduce Snowflake Document AI, outline its top 3 use cases, and examine how BlueCloud helps companies leverage its capabilities.
What is Snowflake Document AI?
Imagine you could simply ask machines to read, understand, and analyze documents, instead of doing this manually? Snowflake Document AI allows you to do this and shift your focus to acting on information rather than compiling it.
Snowflake Document AI is a Snowflake AI feature that uses a large language model, Arctic-TILT to extract data from documents of various formats including text-heavy paragraphs and content from graphs, logos, checkmarks and signatures. In other words, it allows machines to read and comprehend data in the same way as humans do.
Document AI enables business teams to automate workflows, extract valuable insights, and enhance decision-making without requiring any machine learning or application development experience.
Key capabilities of Snowflake Document AI
Here are a few transformative capabilities of Snowflake Document AI:
- Continuous processing - Document AI allows you to prepare pipelines for continuous processing of large volumes of documents.
- Accelerated data extraction - Document AI converts the unstructured data contained in documents into easily sorted, organized and analyzed formats.
- Translation of documents for multilingual analysis - With automated language translation, Document AI can translate unstructured text.
- Document classification - Document AI can identify and categorize documents based on content and purpose, helping organizations, particularly in healthcare, finance and retail, to identify and secure documents that contain sensitive or regulated data.
- Fine-tuning for accuracy - Document AI enhances extraction accuracy for your specific needs by fine-tuning the model on your data.
- Seamless integration: Document AI can be integrated with Snowflake’s data platform for further analysis and reporting.
When to use Document AI
Document AI is best used when you want to:
- Create pipelines for continuous processing of new documents of a specific type
- Extract key figures from invoices and other financial documents to help finance departments square their books
- Extract contract terms, allowing for easy categorization and analysis
- Automatically parse menu items for a more digital dining experience
- Turn unstructured data from documents into structured data in tables
- Leverage the domain knowledge of business users to set up models for identifying specific information within documents
Top 3 Use Cases Where Snowflake Document AI Can Bring Value
Retail: Enhancing Supplier Efficiency with Intelligent Document Processing
Challenge:
One of the key challenges in supply chain management is evaluating supplier efficiency. To do this effectively, it's critical to identify key performance indicators (KPIs), which are often buried in a vast amount of documentation.
In the case of a retail company managing long-term relationships with multiple suppliers, the details of agreements are usually outlined in complex contracts. These contracts, often renewed every three to five years, contain various clauses, metrics, and terms crucial for assessing supplier performance.
Analyzing these documents to extract relevant KPIs is a labor-intensive and error-prone process. Business intelligence (BI) teams would need to manually sift through a massive volume of documentation, interpret KPIs for each supplier, and then translate this information into measurable data points. This process can be time-consuming and lead to human errors. On top of this, these contracts are governed by various local and global policies, making manual processing even more challenging.
How Document AI can help:
Document AI enables organizations to efficiently process large volumes of documents at scale, quickly extracting key data points and translating them into actionable KPIs. This technology reduces the need for manual intervention, minimizes errors, and allows companies to evaluate supplier performance more accurately and swiftly.
Impact:
By leveraging the power of Document AI, retail companies can transform a traditionally tedious task into a more efficient, automated workflow, leading to more informed decision-making and improved supplier management.
HR: Faster access to the right employee information through automated matching processes
Challenge:
Recruiting, managing talent and evaluating candidates are costly and time-consuming processes. Doing extensive paperwork, conducting approval cycles and numerous processes, like resume screening, candidate matching and scoring – all of these are labor-intensive tasks that form silos and prolong the onboarding lifecycle.
How Document AI can help:
Intelligent document processing powered by Snowflake Document AI can revolutionize recruitment and HR operations by significantly reducing manual effort.
Additionally, Document AI can enhance the functionality of a chatbot, enabling queries about specific terms in contracts or agreements, such as payment terms in a Statement of Work (SOW) or master service agreements. This can be especially useful for managing and querying large volumes of contractual documents.
Impact:
Snowflake Document AI offers benefits that extend far beyond enhancing operational efficiency. It can transform HR landscape by:
- Reducing human errors
- Automating document classification
- Enhancing accuracy
- Increasing employee satisfaction
- Refocusing HR professionals’ attention to strategic initiatives
Finance: Shifting from Manual Data Entry to High-Tech IDP Financial Services
Financial institutions that have existed for a few decades now could not have imagined that one day, they will be able to use cutting edge technologies such as Document AI to automate data processing.
The truth is that shifting from manual data entry to a high-tech financial service powered by intelligent data processing is imperative for organizations that want to stay ahead of the curve.
Snowflake Document AI plays a huge role in this transition.
Challenge:
With an increased volume of financial documents, locating specific files becomes tiresome. On top of this, documents go through multiple stages (processing, review, and approval) before reaching their intended destination. Another major issue is the sensitive nature of financial data where security and privacy are critical. Finally, financial data comes in many different formats— structured, semi-structured, and unstructured which hinders effective data management and prevents organizations from extracting valuable insights.
How Document AI can help:
Snowflake Document AI can extract key figures to help finance departments square their books. It can also automate extraction of relevant information from loan applications such as financial statements and borrower details. Next it can help prevent fraud by identifying suspicious patterns and anomalies within documents.
On top of this, while paper invoices may differ depending on the supplier, Snowflake Document AI can identify critical fields in invoices, including unit cost and quantity. Finally, IDP can help financial organizations meet strict compliance requirements through automation of data extraction and validation.
Impact:
According to PwC, intelligent document processing can help midsize companies save 2,000 hours for every 100,000 pages processed. Snowflake Document AI has the potential to save hundreds of hours each month, enabling financial institutions to concentrate on more meaningful work instead of repetitive tasks. Result? Enhanced customer experience, significant cost reduction and enhanced operational efficiency.
How does BlueCloud revolutionize data processing with Snowflake Document AI?
As the Snowflake data cloud services Americas growth partner of the year 2024, BlueCloud is instrumental in helping joint customers build effective business strategies and modern cloud technology solutions.
BlueCloud’s dedication and commitment to Snowflake workloads, and profound expertise in Snowflake's Document AI combined with Snowflake’s Data Cloud as an integral platform can significantly enhance our clients' capabilities in extracting valuable insights from unstructured data locked in thousands and thousands of documents.
Here are some of the key BlueCloud’s capabilities that can help companies unlock the full value of Snowflake Document AI:
- The team’s deep knowledge of Snowflake's Document AI: BlueCloud specialization in Document AI ensures precise and efficient extraction of data from various documents, improving accuracy and reducing manual processing times.
- Providing tailored support: BlueCloud provides dedicated support specifically designed for Snowflake users, ensuring clients unlock the best value from their data investments.
- Use case ownership and technological advancements: Powered by extensive expertise in data processing and AI, BlueCloud can help organizations tackle complex use cases with Snowflake Document AI more effectively through regular tech advancements and continuous support.
- Streamlining operations: By integrating seamlessly with existing Snowflake infrastructures, BlueCloud’s solutions help clients streamline document processing workflows, resulting in operational excellence and cost-effective resource allocation.
- Empowering scalable solutions: BlueCloud allows clients to easily scale their document processing requirements, handling growing data volumes while maintaining both speed and accuracy.
- Driving innovation: BlueCloud is dedicated to incorporating Snowflake Document AI into future projects, empowering clients to reach their data objectives.
Transform Your Business Processes with Snowflake Document AI and BlueCloud
Explore our services to learn how BlueCloud can help you gain value out of unstructured data with Snowflake Document AI. Reach out to our experts to learn more.
Try Snowflake Document AI to accelerate document processing for efficient data extraction.
