Other agencies could see similar benefits, according to Amy Jones, U.S. public sector AI lead at EY. “IDP offers a low-effort, high-reward opportunity to enhance existing systems,” she says.
For example, many agencies use modern ticketing systems to improve visibility and automate workflows, but these rely on manual processes for routing tickets and providing updates.
“By incorporating AI-driven IDP, agencies can eliminate these bottlenecks, streamline operations and ensure more accurate, real-time information throughout the process,” Jones says.
Revolutionary Data Extraction and Transparency
In addition to applying Textract to census data, NARA also has used IDP to open access to tens of thousands of pages of Revolutionary War–era documents.
“We conducted a project with Family Search, one of our digitization partners,” to extract text from handwritten Revolutionary War–era pension files, Reilly says.
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The Archives shared about 30,000 pages that had been manually transcribed by NARA’s Citizen Archivist community, “and we were able to use that as a ground-truth data set to train the text extraction tools,” she says. The partner organization then used the tools to extract text from just over 2 million additional documents, “and we are sharing them with the public through the Catalog in a very transparent way.”
To achieve those kinds of results, she says, agencies need to have ground rules in place.
“First and foremost, it’s about using AI and machine learning tools in a trustworthy, risk-aware way. The National Archives is a leader in responsible and trustworthy use of AI in the Archives and library science field,” she says.
That means, in part, that “you maintain the layers, so you have the authentic copy of the document that you stand by as authentic, original,” she says. Then, it’s important to ensure “that the metadata is labeled as AI/ML-generated, so our citizens have that visibility into the sources of the information that we’re sharing online.”
Overall, PTI’s Shark sees IDP benefitting federal workers at a time when job satisfaction may be stretched thin.
“If you’re acting like a machine and all you do is process the same thing over and over again, you’re bored, you become less efficient, and you might be making mistakes,” he says, adding that AI-informed IDP can help improve both the process and the product.
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IDP and Government Efficiency Go Hand-in-Hand
Other agencies also look to leverage intelligent document processing.
The Department of Energy, for example, reports achieving more than 92% precision when using Google Document AI to extract information from test data.
There’s urgency these days around government efficiency, and Shark expects that to bring IDP to the fore.
“There’s an open desire to cut some of the fat that exists in government,” he says. “These tools become far more important at a time when there is such political pressure to do more with less.”
In document processing, “the whole issue is about accessibility and retrieval, getting the information into the hands of the right people, at the right time, very quickly — not having to wait weeks or days or months,” he says.
