Data extraction from printed forms is by now a tried and true technology. Form Recognizer extracts key value pairs, tables and text from documents such as tax statements, oil and gas drilling well reports, completion reports, invoices, and purchase orders. However, real-world businesses often rely on a variety of documents for their day-to-day needs that are not always cleanly printed.

Decision makers love data. But until recently, organizations have primarily relied on structured data—highly organized data sets that are easy to analyze. Unstructured data, like emails and text, don’t usually follow a predefined model or fit into relational databases. Therefore, a great deal of enterprise data is unstructured, but many organizations may ignore it completely because of the inherent difficulties of analyzing it.