In plain English
OCR, or optical character recognition, extracts text from images. Document processing goes further by identifying useful fields and connecting them to a workflow. It may use OCR, templates, machine learning or a combination of these techniques.
A receipt image converted to text is not yet a checked accounting record. The workflow still needs to identify the supplier and amounts, validate the result, match it to the right transaction and handle exceptions. AI can help with varied layouts, but a simpler approach may work well for predictable forms.
Both conventional and AI-based extraction can produce incorrect results without an obvious warning. Reliability comes from testing representative documents, checking business rules and deciding where people review the output. It is not an inherent property of choosing AI.
If an older extraction project failed, inspect the failure before replacing it: was the issue image quality, layout variation, missing data, matching rules or integration? Compare approaches against that problem and the cost of checking their results.
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