Abin Antony – Technical Articles

Manually processing unstructured documents – like sales invoices, purchase orders or any scanned images – has always felt like one of the most frustrating bottlenecks in any business operations. I recently worked on automating this entire workflow using Azure AI Document Intelligence, Python, and Databricks, and the results were transformative.

🌟 The Challenge

Manually reading documents/invoices, extracting details, and typing them into Line-Of-Business systems is slow, error-prone, and hard to scale. Every document/invoice might have a different format, making it even harder to standardize the data for analytics and reporting.

⚙️ Implementation overview

I built an end-to-end solution that:

• Ingests invoice documents from File share or Azure Blob Storage
• Developed minimal code logic using Azure AI Document Intelligence (Form Recognizer) to extract structured data. This is a full control option on code! Alternatively, there is a Low-code approach using Power Automate AI Builder
• Cleans and transforms extracted data(json/csv) in Databricks notebooks or Jobs
• Stores it in Delta Lake for reporting and integration

🗺️ Architecture

Here’s the high-level architecture of my solution:

🎤 Demonstration Video

📈 Impact / Results

• ⏱️ Reduced manual operations by ~80%
• ✅ Cut processing time from hours to minutes
• 📉 Fewer errors and better auditability
• 📊 Real-time reporting and better business intelligence

💻 Code References

https://github.com/abinjaik/azureaidocumentextract

🤝 Call to Action

If you’re thinking about automating invoice processing or want to explore Azure AI and Databricks for document workflows, let’s connect. I’d be happy to share more about how I built this and what I learned along the way.