From Data Entry to Decision Engine: IDP’s Glow-Up Story

For a long time, Intelligent Document Processing lived quietly in the background.

It did its job without complaints: take documents, extract data, pass it along. In many ways, it was just data entry at scale. Useful, yes – but hardly transformative.

Then IDP had a glow-up.

When extraction was enough

Traditional IDP was designed to answer straightforward questions. What’s the invoice number? Who’s the vendor? What’s the total amount? Speed and accuracy were the goal, and for years, that worked.

But as organizations became overwhelmed with unstructured data – contracts, emails, PDFs, forms, reports – something broke. Documents weren’t just holding data anymore. They were holding decisions, risk, and intent.

Simply extracting fields stopped being enough.

The glow-up: from data to understanding

Generative AI changed the role of IDP entirely.

Instead of treating documents like static inputs, modern IDP systems began treating them like sources of meaning. The question shifted from “Can we capture this data?” to “What should we do because of this data?”

Context suddenly mattered. Relationships mattered. Edge cases mattered. And IDP became capable of handling all of it – even when documents didn’t follow a template or a predictable format.

Extraction didn’t disappear. It just stopped being the end goal.

From processing pipeline to decision engine

This is where the real transformation happened.

GenAI-powered IDP doesn’t just output structured data. It can summarize what matters, flag anomalies, explain why something was classified a certain way, and connect insights across multiple documents.

Instead of blindly feeding downstream systems, IDP now adds judgment and reasoning before anything moves forward. It doesn’t just support decisions – it actively shapes them.

That’s not automation. That’s intelligence.

Why this matters

When IDP evolves into a decision engine, everything downstream gets better. Teams move faster because context is built in. Automation becomes resilient instead of brittle. Humans spend less time reviewing documents and more time acting on insights.

IDP stops being a back-office utility and becomes a strategic layer in how organizations operate.

The glow-up, in one sentence

IDP used to do the paperwork.
Now it does the thinking around the paperwork.

We’ve moved from data entry to understanding, and from understanding to decisions. And once IDP makes that leap, there’s no going back.

TL;DR

Generative AI turned IDP from a data extraction tool into a true decision engine -and that’s one glow-up worth paying attention to.