Transforming Enterprise Workflows with AI and IDP

Every enterprise runs on documents. Invoices, purchase orders, contracts, and forms are everywhere, yet most still require hours of manual handling. 

At this year’s Workato’s WOW Conference, I shared how Workato is helping teams change that with Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and AI connectivity. These capabilities make it possible to extract information, orchestrate downstream actions, and put AI to work in everyday workflows.

Watch the full session to see all of the insights!

Intelligent Document Processing at scale

We launched IDP last year, and it has quickly become one of our most adopted AI products. Now generally available, IDP combines OCR with vision and language models to deliver 10 to 15 percent higher accuracy on complex documents than other conventional tools. Customers can get started with out-of-the-box document types like purchase orders, passports, and receipts, or define their own custom schemas without wrestling with complex interfaces to get the data they need.

What matters most is the speed to value. Some customers have gone from pilot to production in under a week. Others are processing more than 10,000 pages a day in critical finance and legal workflows – and IDP has allowed them to find more use cases and validate fit quickly. Instead of spending months trying to understand and map a single use case, you can start small, iterate fast and leverage IDP for the workflows most important to you.

But Workato provides more than just IDP to level up your workflows. We have connectors to all of the major LLM providers so you can easily bring in the power of LLMs. We provide business actions like categorise and parse text so you don’t have to do any complex prompt engineering or json manipulations and can focus on the business process. Across our customers we have noticed some common usage patterns that can help you identify key areas and approaches to get started with.

• Summarization of long content such as support tickets or emails
• Information extraction from structured and free-form text
• Categorization to triage and route requests
• Generation of responses or updates with the right context
• Enterprise search that retrieves knowledge across systems and feeds it directly into workflows

Beyond the underlying approach we also look at the common use cases and business units to focus on:

Customer support leads adoption with more than one third of AI workflows, followed by IT and revenue operations. Importantly, about a quarter of these still include a human in the loop, which ensures governance and builds trust in the outcomes.

For example, in customer service a purchase order update might arrive by email. With Workato, IDP can extract the details, confirm them against Salesforce or NetSuite, summarize the requested changes, and route them to the right team. Instead of hours of back-and-forth, the customer gets a fast and accurate response.

Case study: Fastly’s journey

To show how this works in practice, I was joined on stage by Adam Reid, Integration Architect at Fastly, a global content delivery network that accelerates and secures digital experiences.

Fastly’s accounts payable team faced a choice. They could purchase a new invoice automation tool for ninety thousand dollars, or they could see if Workato could handle the job. Instead of waiting around, Adam built a prototype in fifteen minutes using IDP that beyond processing documents, could integrate into their business applications.

The workflow was straightforward:

• Invoices dropped into Google Drive triggered Workato IDP
• Data was extracted, validated, and upserted into Coupa
• Slack notifications kept stakeholders informed at every step
• Errors were routed into labeled folders so AP could self-serve

The results speak for themselves. Last month, 17 percent of their total volume was completely automated, saving more than 20 hours of manual entry. The transparency of Slack notifications built trust, and the team is now exploring new projects, including contract analysis and customer sentiment tracking.

Looking ahead

We are continuing to enhance IDP with stronger confidence scoring, field-level validations, and multi-turn document agents that check and verify outputs automatically. We are also working on ways to embed enterprise knowledge bases directly into workflows so that AI can act with even more context.

The takeaway

Fastly’s story shows what is possible when AI and orchestration come together. IDP provides accuracy and scale, while Workato’s enterprise orchestration ties it into the systems and processes where work actually happens. The result is faster cycles, reduced costs, and new confidence to expand AI across the business.