Most businesses run on documents that software cannot read: contracts, specifications, submittals, invoices, purchase orders, inspection reports, correspondence. People extract the important parts by hand, transcribe them into a system, and the organisation absorbs the cost of that as normal.
Document intelligence is the work of turning those documents into structured, verifiable data — and doing it in a way that a person can check.
What It Does
- Extraction — pull the specific fields that matter from documents that vary in format.
- Classification and routing — identify what a document is and start the right process.
- Comparison — check a submittal against a specification, or an invoice against a purchase order, and surface the differences.
- Obligation and requirement extraction — what a contract actually commits you to.
- Summarisation with citations — every summary traceable to the page and region it came from.
- Validation and confidence — flag low-confidence extractions for review rather than passing them through silently.
The Design Rule: Never Silently Wrong
An extraction system that is 95% accurate and tells you which 5% it is unsure about is genuinely useful. One that is 98% accurate and presents everything with equal confidence is dangerous, because the errors are invisible until they cause a problem downstream.
So confidence scoring, validation rules and a human review queue are core to the design rather than optional extras. Documents that are clean and consistent flow through; the awkward ones surface for a person.
Where This Fits
Document intelligence is usually a component rather than a product — it feeds workflow automation, powers retrieval and search, and underpins estimating work such as our project estimation agent.
Tell us which documents are consuming your team’s time and we will assess what can be extracted reliably — and what genuinely needs a person.
Related services
- RAG and Enterprise Search — Related: RAG and enterprise search.