HFS has published its first intelligent document processing (IDP) Horizons report covering the broad landscape of IDP vendors landscape engaging with major enterprises. IDP is all about documents in the loose sense—extending beyond paper to include emails, digital forms, attachments, chats, and paper. It has quickly gained importance as a transformation enabler that uses automation to reduce manual effort and process the data present in documents faster and more accurately. IDP systems mimic human cognitive abilities to understand and analyze structured and unstructured data in documents.
However, that is only the primary use case for IDP. It can do much more, and through our analysis, we have seen how many IDP vendors link IDP with data and insights to drive enterprise decision-making.
Enterprises continue to struggle with making the most of their existing and new data, and IDP provides a base to extract data from documents and restructure it into more digestible formats. With the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), IDP has become an even more vital tool, giving enterprises higher accuracy and lower time to value.
Enterprises are building on the basics to target improved CX and EX
While efficiency gains and cost reductions are the essential outcomes enterprises seek, the intent for more mature results such as improved customer and employee experience (CX and EX), impact on top-line growth, and business model development are also gaining importance.
To deliver on these outcomes, IDP vendors have invested heavily in technology and internal IP or partnered with tech vendors to plug internal gaps and augment delivery. GenAI capabilities have become integral to most IDP initiatives; many vendors have already integrated them into their abilities.
The future of IDP lies in vendors using NLP (natural language processing) and image recognition to improve accuracy and efficiency, and—much in line with the outcome of combining IDP and large language model (LLM) capabilities—identifying patterns from data.
OCR is a thing of the past as IDP goes beyond document processing to unlock insights from masses of data
While efficiency gains and cost reductions are the essential outcomes enterprises seek, the intent for more mature results such as improved customer and employee experience (CX and EX), impact on top-line growth, and business model development are also gaining importance.
We assessed 26 key vendors (see Exhibit 1) in the HFS Horizons: Intelligent Document Processing Products, 2023 report.
Exhibit 1: Leading IDP vendors are building robust partner ecosystems, focusing on creative commercial models, and building internal IP to augment client delivery 
Note: Service providers within each Horizon are listed alphabetically.
Horizon 3 is crowded with many vendors differentiating to deliver strategic outcomes to clients
Market leaders like ABBYY, AntWorks, Automation Anywhere, Automation Hero, AYR.AI, Google, Hyperscience, Pega, Microsoft Power Automate, Rossum, and UiPath are creating an ecosystem by partnering and working on tech advancements to help enterprises make that push toward getting more insight out of existing data and seeing them transform at an ecosystem level.
These vendors have a strong product roadmap planned and a vision and strategy aligned to achieve that goal. IDP for this group of vendors is more about being enablers to large-scale transformation efforts.
Horizon 2 innovators deliver outcomes beyond essential cost reduction and efficiency, enabling improved CX, PX, and EX
Appian, Botminds.AI, Kofax, LAIYE, Newgen, Nividous, OpenBots, Parashift, SS&C Blue Prism, and WorkFusion are the enterprise innovators driving enterprise-level outcomes.
These vendors work closely with partners to co-create and collaborate to bring a united front to enterprises in their transformation goals and work through loads of unstructured documents and data types.
Horizon 1 disruptors are enabling digital transformation at a functional level
Datamatics, InfiniaML, KnowledgeLake, Parascript, and qBotica are the IDP disruptors. These vendors are doing a great job helping clients get the basics right—an essential step in helping deliver clear functional outcomes. These vendors have robust IDP products and deliver fundamental value to clients.
The Bottom Line: Enterprise leaders looking to accelerate their digital transformation journey should seek an IDP vendor that matches their needs and maturity.
Don’t make your decision based on which vendor offers the broadest range of bells and whistles. Instead, choose the vendor that provides capabilities that align best with your enterprise’s needs and innovation scope.
HFS subscribers can download the report here.
Posted in : Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Autonomous Enterprise, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, Employee Experience, GenAI, HFS Horizons, intelligent-automation, Large Language Models (LLMs), Natural-Language-Processing, OneOffice, Robotic Process Automation
