As the market for AI-powered intelligent automation grows, the component technologies of the platforms that deliver it are becoming more complex. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), a capability that has existed on its own and part of process automation platforms for some time, has gained enough prominence that interest in IDP tools is reaching a zenith.
As a result, global tech consultancy Gartner has devoted a “Magic Quadrant” vendor assessment to IDP providers for the very first time. The Stamford, Conn.-based firm has named ABBYY, Hyperscience, Infrrd, Tungsten Automation and UiPath as “leaders” in its inaugural Magic Quadrant for IDP solutions.
Gartner uses a proprietary analysis to place industry vendors in a graph that plots “ability to execute” on one axis and “completeness of vision” on the other. Companies that exhibit a high degree of both (those in the upper right “quadrant”) are identified by the company as “leaders” in the space.
It notes that the market for IDP solutions is fairly large and growing, encompassing more than 100 vendors, though it only evaluated 18. The report also acknowledges that the introduction of AI has catalyzed a significant leap in the capabilities of IDP tools.
“IDP solutions build on—and continue to include—long-standing optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities to extract characters from images,” the report’s authors wrote. “Instead of using fixed, rigid templates to map characters to data schemas, their AI also utilizes contextual cues to autonomously map characters from multiple formats and varying layouts of content to data schemas. Consequently, IDP solutions have the potential to process a broad range of document types and variations.”
The assessment evaluated capabilities and features from the different providers that include how documents are ingested and classified, what kind of data can be extracted, reviewed and integrated into third-party applications, and how that feeds into automated workflows.
In addition to the leaders, Gartner also evaluated Appian, Automation Anywhere, AWS, Google, Graphwise, Hyland, Hypatos, IBM, Laiye, Microsoft, Nanonets, OpenText and Rossum.
