Is IDP Becoming the Backbone of Enterprise AI?

When people talk about enterprise AI, the spotlight usually falls on copilots, chat interfaces, and large language models. That’s the visible layer.

But underneath those experiences, a quieter shift is happening. Intelligent Document Processing is becoming foundational to how enterprise AI actually works.

Enterprise AI Still Runs on Documents

For most organizations, the most important information isn’t neatly stored in databases. It lives in contracts, invoices, claims, financial statements, and regulatory filings.

AI systems can’t reason or automate effectively without understanding this content. Raw documents aren’t usable on their own – they need to be interpreted, structured, and grounded in context. That’s where IDP comes in.

From Plumbing to Intelligence

IDP used to sit at the edge of systems, extracting fields and passing data downstream. With generative AI, it’s moving closer to the core.

Modern IDP doesn’t just prepare data for AI. It shapes how AI understands the business by resolving ambiguity, reasoning across documents, and surfacing uncertainty instead of hiding it.

Copilots, agents, and automation layers increasingly depend on this foundation – whether they explicitly acknowledge it or not.

Trust Is the Real Constraint

As AI moves closer to decision-making, trust becomes non-negotiable. Enterprises need to know where information came from, why conclusions were reached, and how confident the system is.

Documents are the source of truth. Base64 is the layer that connects those sources to AI in a way that’s explainable, auditable, and reliable.

A Quiet but Structural Shift

IDP isn’t becoming the backbone of enterprise AI because it’s flashy. It’s becoming the backbone because nothing else works without it.

As AI becomes embedded in core workflows, the quality of document understanding increasingly determines how far enterprise AI can go.

And that makes IDP infrastructure – not just tooling.