With more and more of our everyday personal and business lives transitioning to digital, it is increasingly important for companies to digitize their operations in every way possible. Part of this ongoing shift is the need for businesses to take their data digital, and this means finding the most effective ways to digitize paper documents.
Not so long ago, the majority of businesses needed to rely on employees copying data from physical documents, by hand, into computers. This process of manual transfer is extremely time-consuming, repetitive, and usually has a high error rate. Even today, many businesses mostly rely on manual data transfer, with all its associated issues, as their primary method of digitization.
More recently, optical character recognition (OCR) technology has been available for organizations to cut down on the human labor needed to digitize data, helping them to automate parts of the process. Unfortunately, basic OCR often also has its share of issues. Thankfully, AI-enhanced OCR is now available to businesses, offering a more powerful, accurate, and reliable digitization tool.
In this article, we look at how OCR and AI-based OCR can help your business digitize data more effectively.
What is OCR and how can AI improve it?
OCR is a technology designed to automatically recognize and digitize the information on physical documents and transfer it to a digital format. It can also be used on digital forms of documentation, such as PDFs, to transfer the data into an editable format.
As mentioned above, the only way for businesses to digitize their data was once manually transferring it – a slow, inaccurate, and expensive process. Some organizations also utilize basic OCR technology to digitize their data, but this can also suffer from poor accuracy rates as well as compatibility issues with some types of complex and unique documents.
The most powerful method of data digitization is to use AI-powered OCR. Modern AI is able to improve all the key functionality of OCR software, making it more versatile, more accurate, and more useful to businesses.
How can OCR and AI help you to digitize your data?
Faster data digitization
One of the major challenges of digitization is the fact it can be a slow, labor-intensive process. Both manual data transfer and basic OCR platforms can suffer from slow processing times, potentially holding back progress and causing delays to general operations.
AI-powered OCR works much faster than manual transfer, and can also avoid some of the setbacks encountered by basic OCR technology, speeding up the entire digitization process.
Scale your digitization effortlessly
It is nearly impossible to predict future demand and the amount of paperwork that goes with it. Fluctuating market conditions, business growth, and many other factors can all influence the amount of work any business will have over time, and unpredictable amounts of paperwork will be generated as a result – but this information still needs to be digitized.
This is a problem when manually transferring data, as each worker can only process one document at a time. To cope with surges in demand, businesses need to either take extra time to digitize everything or hire more staff, both of which can be very impractical.
OCR with AI, on the other hand, can potentially process thousands of documents in the time it takes a person to process one, making it a flexible solution to growing businesses and demand fluctuations.
Process even the most complex documents
Another serious limitation of traditional digitization methods is their inability to deal with complex documents and unique formats. People work slowly when unfamiliar with a document type, and the error rate can become unacceptably high. Basic OCR software can also struggle and become useless when presented with unique and complex document types.
Advanced AI enables some modern OCR platforms to recognize and accurately digitize even highly complex document formats with ease, bypassing these challenges. Additionally, algorithms can often be pre-trained for compatibility with any specified documents, ensuring seamless functionality with all types of paperwork.
Simpler data storage and retrieval
Physical documents can be difficult to store, expensive to produce, and can take a lot of work to copy, scan, print, and share. These factors and more make them impractical for businesses, so the advantages of digital documentation are clear.
AI-based OCR platforms can facilitate and automate the digitization process, making it far simpler for companies to store, retrieve, and share their data. Not only can this be significantly more cost-effective, but it also reflects the modern business environment with operations across borders and regular communication between dispersed stakeholders.
Improved data accuracy
Potentially the most powerful benefit of AI-powered OCR is the improved rates of accuracy it can provide. Accuracy of data is hugely important to any organization, but digitizing data via manual data transfer basic OCR software can result in high error rates. Modern AI-powered OCR can consistently achieve significantly better accuracy than other methods, making it the obvious choice for accuracy-minded businesses.
Why choose Digitise.AI?
Digitise.AI is a software platform dedicated to the automatic digitization of paperwork. Our cutting-edge technology uses advanced AI algorithms to provide accurate, reliable, and cost-effective digitization of nearly any document automatically, helping to simplify data management for any organization
Built with compatibility and ease-of-use as core priorities, Digitise.AI can be customized by pre-training it to work perfectly with any document type that you specify. We also offer multi-language support to ensure compatibility with an even more diverse range of documents, right out of the box.
Get in touch with our team today to schedule a demo and see Digitise.AI in action.
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