From OCR to OMG: How GenAI Turned IDP into a Thinking Machine

Once upon a time, Intelligent Document Processing was all about OCR – Scan the document. Extract the text. Map a few fields. Hope nothing changed.

It worked – but it was rigid, brittle, and very mechanical.

Then Generative AI showed up – and IDP had its OMG moment.

Generative AI transforms IDP
From reading text to understanding meaning

 

Traditional OCR was great at answering one question:
“What does this document say?”

Generative AI asked a better one:
“What does this document mean?”

That single shift changes everything.

Modern GenAI-powered IDP doesn’t just pull words from a page. It understands:

  • context across pages and sections

  • relationships between entities

  • intent, nuance, and exceptions

  • messy, real-world, never-seen-before documents

No rigid templates. No endless rule sets. Just intelligence.

Why this changes the game

 

When GenAI enters the IDP stack, things get interesting fast.

Templates quietly disappear – systems adapt to documents, not the other way around.

Documents become conversational – you ask questions instead of building pipelines.
Edge cases stop being scary – new formats and layouts are still handled.
Extraction turns into reasoning – data capture becomes insight generation.

IDP doesn’t just automate anymore. – It thinks.

Meet the thinking machine

A GenAI-powered IDP system goes beyond exporting clean JSON.

It can summarize documents in plain language.
Explain why something was classified or extracted a certain way.
Connect insights across multiple documents.
Adapt to new document types without retraining or reconfiguration.

Less parser – more collaborator.

OCR walked so GenAI IDP could run

 

OCR was never the problem – it laid the foundation.

But GenAI unlocked what OCR alone never could: true document understanding at scale. We’ve officially moved from:
 pixels → text
 to:
 documents → insights → decisions

And once IDP starts thinking, there’s no going back.

TL;DR


OCR taught machines to see.
GenAI taught them to understand.
Base64’s IDP platform? It actually thinks.

That’s not just progress – that’s an OMG moment.