Every once in a while you get validation that a business decision you’ve made was right on target. It’s a great feeling. A recent report on intelligent document processing (IDP) from market watchers at Deep Analysis should serve as just such validation for any company that’s investing in IDP.
The report, “Intelligent Document Processing Market Analysis: 2022-2026,” accurately portrays the market drivers behind IDP – tasks like automating document-intensive processes – and paints a rosy financial picture of its future.
IDP helps cut costs while increasing productivity
Let’s start with those market numbers. Deep Analysis puts the IDP market at just over $2 billion in 2022 and forecasts it to grow to $3.5 billion to $4 billion by the end of 2026. That’s a 5-year compound annual growth rate of about 15.9%, “making IDP one of the healthier markets in the enterprise software sector,” the report says.
What makes those numbers even more impressive is that the report was written amidst significant upheaval: high inflation, a war in Ukraine, supply chain disruptions, energy price shocks, and more. Nonetheless, Deep Analysis says IDP “is exceptionally well suited to survive and, in some cases, even thrive in a down-trending business environment.”
The reason? Because IDP is “a proven contributor to cutting costs and increasing productivity through automating manual tasks.” Cutting costs while increasing productivity, of course, is an excellent course of action in an uncertain economy.
At Indico Data we were also happy to see Deep Analysis includes a point that we’ve been making to anyone who will listen: “In most use cases, IDP does not replace humans in the workplace; rather, it augments their work to make them more productive by automating detailed, boring busywork such as data entry.”
We’ll add another plus: effective automation solutions perform those tasks with better accuracy than your employees – because computers don’t get bored and tired.
Related content: Finding the best intelligent document processing vendors: A checklist
Automating document intake tasks
Deep Analysis does a good job outlining the key functions IDP solutions perform, including document acquisition, classification, separation, and extraction. Consider a process such as insurance underwriting. In a commercial insurance company, this involves accepting submissions from brokers, typically via email (acquisition). Attached to the email is a single PDF that is actually a collection of several discrete documents.
Normally, an associate has to read the email, determine what the request is (classification), read the attached PDF, and separate each discrete document contained in it (separation). Next the associate has to find and pull out certain bits of data for input into the company’s insurance underwriting system (extraction).
An intelligent intake solution can handle all four of those steps, at least to some extent. The Deep Analysis report was once again correct in saying you should beware of any vendor who suggests their solution can automate 100% of such tasks. That’s simply not realistic; there are always exceptions that require employee attention. But automating 70% of intake tasks is well within reason – and still delivers significant return-on-investment.
Related content: Deloitte survey shows technology plays a key role in insurance underwriting modernization
Indico Data: One to watch
As for how to pick a vendor amid the myriad IDP options, Deep Insights suggests focusing on your specific needs and “only shortlist vendors that are experienced in meeting your requirements.” Sound advice once again.
For our part, Indico Data has particular expertise with insurance and financial services and banking. Use cases such as intelligent document intake is a specialty. Need to automate underwriting submissions or claims processing? We’ve been there. Ditto for customer onboarding, another document-intensive process. Our intelligent intake solution can handle all manner of unstructured documents, including PDFs, emails, custom forms, even images.
Deep Analysis even labeled Indico Data an “innovator” that’s among the “ones to watch.”
“The company has an impressive strategy to democratize neural networks and bring the benefits into mainstream document workflows,” its report says, referring to some of the artificial intelligence underpinnings of our solution. “The software offers step-by-step on-screen instructions that walk even a novice user through the process of building an enterprise grade AI model to, for example, sort the scanned mail, or something equally prosaic and useful.”
We’re practically blushing. Read more about what Deep Analysis has to say by downloading its report. Or contact us, and we’ll be happy to field any questions.
