Google launches AI-powered document processing services in general availability

Google today announced that several of its cloud-based, AI-powered document processing products have become generally available after launching in preview last year. DocAI platform, Lending DocAI, and Procurement DocAI, which have been piloted by thousands of businesses to date, are now open to all customers and include new features and resources.

Companies spend an average of $20 to file and store a single document, by some estimates, and only 18% of companies consider themselves paperless. An IDC report revealed that document-related challenges account for a 21.3% productivity loss, and U.S. companies waste a collective $8 billion annually managing paperwork.

How it works

With the launch in general availability, Lending DocAI, which processes loan applicants’ asset documents, now offers a set of specialized AI models for paystubs and bank statements. The service also now benefits from DocAI platform’s Human-in-the-Loop AI capability, which provides a workflow to manage human data review tasks.

As Google explains, Human-in-the-Loop AI enables human reviewers to verify data captured by Lending DocAI, Procurement DocAI, and other offerings in DocAI platform. The system shows a percentage score of how “sure” it is that the AI ingested the document correctly, and it’s customizable, with the flexibility to set different thresholds and assign groups of reviewers to stages of a workflow. Developers can choose reviewers to assign to tasks either from within their own company or from partner organizations.

Lending institutions like banks and brokers process hundreds of pages of paperwork for every loan. It’s a heavily manual process that adds thousands of dollars to the cost of issuing a loan. While hardly flawless, automated processing can give customers a degree of confidence they can afford the property they’re interested in, and some lenders are able to complete the ordeal within minutes, as opposed to the weeks it once took.

Procurement DocAI

Procurement DocAI, which performs document processing for invoices, receipts, and more, has gained an AI parser for electric, water, and other utility bills. The latest release taps Google’s Knowledge Graph to validate information, a system that understands over 500 facts about 5 billion entities from the web, as well as from open and licensed databases. Google claims that Knowledge Graph can help increase document parsing accuracy by identifying, for example, that “Angelina” correlates to “Angelina Paris,” a bakery identified using geodata.

Google also today announced a partnership with mortgage servicing firm Mr. Cooper, following a collaboration with home loan company Roostify last October. Google says Mr. Cooper will offer its customers greater automation and workflow tools by connecting them with the DocAI platform.

“Over the last few years, we have made substantial investments in our proprietary servicing technology and core mortgage platform that have revolutionized the customer experience while providing dramatic efficiencies in operating cost. By joining forces with Google … we are able to build on those advances and help make these technologies available for the mortgage industry to deploy through Google Cloud,” Mr. Cooper CEO Jay Bray said in a press release.

The general release of the DocAI platform comes after Google launched PPP Lending AI, an effort to help lenders expedite the processing of applications for the since-exhausted U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program. As Google explained at the time in a whitepaper, AI can automate the handling of volumes of loan applications by identifying patterns that would take a human worker longer to spot.