The Business Case for IDP Is Strong
In an ideal world, all data would be digital. But in the real world, most agencies still depend heavily on physical documents, photos and PDFs, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Departments such as the DMV, cross-agency communications, vendor interactions and evidentiary processes all rely on unstructured data in physical forms. The complexity is compounded by the need to share data among agencies and with external vendors. In other words, there are dozens of viable IDP use cases.
Furthermore, IDP has inherent safeguards stemming from human review processes that are typically triggered by confidence scores. If that score dips below a certain threshold, employees can be pulled into the process. These features provide quantifiable wins by ensuring accuracy and reliability, and perhaps most important, a human touch.
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Another core benefit of IDP is that agencies can very easily measure the volume of documents processed and the number of people involved. They can subsequently glean metrics that demonstrate tangible costs and benefits. For budget-conscious state and local agencies, this ability to demonstrate ROI is enticing.
Last, but perhaps most important, IDP does not pose an immediate threat to jobs. It is not intended to be a wholesale replacement of clerical staff, but rather to create opportunities for these employees to focus on higher-value tasks, including the aforementioned review processes. Instead of being bogged down by manual data entry and document conversion functions, staff can contribute to more strategic projects that typically get kicked down the road within agencies due to work volume constraints.
Simple IDP Use Cases That Add Immediate Value
Several obvious use cases for IDP have already proved its value, thanks to pre-built models that streamline processes. Examples include:
- Tax forms: W-2, 1040, 1098, 1099 and U.S. mortgage document processing
- Marriage certificates: Efficient reading and processing of these documents
- Checkboxes: Verifying the presence of values rather than interpreting them
- Optical character recognition: Interpreting typed information
- Payments: Processing checks and credit card information
- Invoices: Accounts payable and receivable verification
- Entering ID fields: Reading and processing information from scanned physical IDs
- Receipts: Expense processing
- Contracts: Analysis of terms and conditions and cross-referencing information
Many of these uses are slam dunks at this point, and they demonstrate IDP’s capacity to handle routine yet critical tasks efficiently, reducing the burden on workers and ensuring higher accuracy.
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Advanced Use Cases That Are Becoming More Commonplace
Beyond these foundational applications, IDP has the potential for custom — even advanced — use cases. Some of the possibilities include:
- Validation of multiple files against a checklist to ensure that all information needed to proceed with an internal process has been collected, which reduces errors and the amount of time it would otherwise take for those processes
- Chatbots that can interact with users and documents at the same time; for instance, referring to forms based on human queries, and cross-referencing information from various documents to answer even advanced analytical questions
- Translation of written reports from one language to another, and subsequently storing those reports in digital form
There’s no need to plunge into the deep end with IDP when so much immediate value lies in more immediate use cases. This space has potential to come up against regulatory headwinds, which is why many are proceeding with caution.
But it’s a very real opportunity for agencies to safely and securely acclimate to AI without making overwhelming changes. By starting with simpler, high-impact applications, state and local agencies can gradually build trust in AI, leveraging its benefits while maintaining control and oversight. This approach ensures that AI implementation is smooth, strategic and ultimately beneficial for all stakeholders, including citizens.
