The latest addition to Google LLC’s public cloud is the Document AI Platform, which enables enterprises to extract information contained in digital and printed documents automatically using machine learning.

The new platform was announced today and is currently in preview.

At traditional enterprises, a lot of important information is contained in paperwork such as invoices. That information has to be extracted and loaded into back-office applications such as a firm’s accounting system so it can be processed in an organized way. The challenge is that data entry is still conducted manually in many cases, which takes up valuable time that workers could be spending elsewhere.

Google is promising to automate the process with the Document AI Platform. It brings together two of Google’s existing document processing services, Lending DocAI and Procurement DocAI, in a unified dashboard that workers can use to create automated data extraction workflows.

On launch, the platform includes more than 10 “processors,” pre-packaged data extraction engines each optimized to retrieve information from a different type of document. There are two general-purpose processors: one for regular documents and another for forms. They’re complemented by specialized engines for extracting data from financial documents like lending applications and procurement-related paperwork such as invoices.

All the processors “are created and fine-tuned to achieve industry-leading accuracy, helping businesses confidently unlock insights from documents with machine learning,” Google Cloud product manager Lewis Liu and product marketing manager Yang Liang wrote in a blog post. Over time, they elaborated, more processors will be added to cover additional document types.

Document AI Platform also includes an application programming interface for integrating with a company’s applications.

Besides freeing up employees for higher-value tasks, Google said, it can also help enterprises increase the accuracy of their business information by reducing errors related to manual data entry. The Alphabet Inc. subsidiary claims that one user, Belgian financial technology firm Unifiedpost, managed by increase data capture accuracy by 250%.

There’s a potentially big market for AI tools that can automate document processing because it’s a task that practically every company performs as part of its backoffice operations. Parsing sales orders alone represents a sizable automation opportunity. Conexiom estimates that some $8.4 trillion dollars of business-to-business sales orders are processed manually in the U.S. every year.

Google’s top rivals in the cloud market have also entered this segment. Amazon Web Services Inc. offers Textract for extracting information from documents, while Microsoft Corp. competes in the category with Form Recogniser.

In an attempt to speed up mortgage processing with the first industry-specific offering, Google Cloud has launched Lending DocAI, which can fast track the home loan process. Although the tool is currently in preview, this first vertically specialised solution has been designed for the mortgage industry to advance and automate the process of evaluating the home mortgage process with the help of machine learning.

Google Cloud already has a tool similar to Lending Doc AI — Document AI, that has been developed for a more general-purpose method for performing optical character recognition over complex documents and then extracting data from the same. However, this new tool — Lending DocAI is the first of its kind in the company’s Document AI portfolio, specially created for the mortgage industry.

In the release blog post by Google Cloud, it was stated that the mortgage industry, as well as lending institutions like banks and mortgage brokers, tend to process hundreds of pages of paperwork for every loan. This is not only a tedious manual process but also costs a massive amount of money for issuing a loan. In this industry, borrowers and lenders have high expectations, where it is required to have a mortgage document processing solution which can improve operational efficiency while ensuring speed and data accuracy. Users further want a document automation process to “enhance their current security and compliance posture,” stated in the blog.

Thus Google Cloud has released this specialised tool for the same. “Our goal to understand and synthesise the content of the world wide web has given us unparalleled capabilities in extracting structured data from unstructured sources,” stated Sudheera Vanguri, Product Manager, Google Cloud in the blog. “With Lending DocAI, now in preview, we’re delivering our first vertically specialised solution in this realm.”

According to Google Cloud, this solution will provide accuracy for the industry-leading data in terms of documents relevant to lending. The tool will automate the processes of assessing borrowers’ income and asset documents to speed-up loan applications. In short, it will increase operational efficiency in the loan process; improve home loan experience for borrowers and lenders; and support regulatory and compliance requirements.

In many ways, these advancements in its Google Cloud products showcase the current strategy under the leadership of its CEO Thomas Kurian. In the recent time, the company has developed and launched a plethora of general services for developers at every level, and now it is currently planning to bundle these up to sell as complete solutions to enterprises in various verticals. So far, that strategy seems to be in favour of the company, with a growing revenue of more than 43% in the last quarter.