Document processing

Read, extract and summarise at scale.

Invoices, forms, applications, contracts and reports all follow patterns. Modern models can read them, pull out the fields you need, summarise long documents and flag the unusual ones for a person to review.

Opportunities

Data extraction

Turn PDFs and scanned forms into structured data for your existing systems.

Summaries and triage

Summarise long submissions or reports and route them to the right team.

Comparison

Compare a contract or policy against a standard template and highlight what changed.

What to get right

Human review of decisions

Where extracted data feeds a decision about a person, keep a human in the loop. From 10 December 2026, privacy policies must explain substantially automated decisions that significantly affect individuals.

Records and retention

Processed documents may be records you must keep, or personal information you must destroy when no longer needed. Decide where copies and model outputs are stored.

Cross border disclosure

Sending documents to an overseas AI service can be a disclosure under APP 8. Know where your provider processes data.

This is general information, not legal advice. See our Australian AI compliance guide for the wider landscape and links to official sources.

Where to run it

High volume document work is predictable, which makes it cost effective to run on your own hardware once the workload is steady. Start with a hosted service on test data if you need to prove value first, then move sensitive volumes in house.

First steps

  1. Choose one document type with a clear, measurable manual process today.
  2. Build a test set of real examples with the correct answers filled in by hand.
  3. Measure accuracy per field, and send low confidence results to a person.
  4. Log every extraction so errors can be traced and corrected.

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