Gartner defines Insight Engines as follows: Insight engines apply relevancy methods to discover, analyze, describe and organize content and data. They enable the interactive or proactive delivery or synthesis of information to people, and data to machines, in the context of their respective business moments. Insight engines should be viewed as platforms on which applications are provided, developed or augmented by applying the capabilities listed above to specific employee and customer experience use cases. Such applications are provided out of the box by vendors (e.g., intranet or site search), developed through technical partnerships (e.g., search within third-party applications), developed with customers in-house (e.g., expert finder), or developed through integration with third-party applications (e.g., extracting data from documents to support RPA).
Gartner defines intelligent document processing (IDP) solutions as specialized data integration tools that enable automated extraction of data from multiple formats and various layouts of document content. IDP solutions ingest data for dependent applications and workflows and can be provided as a software product and/or as a service. Organizations receive and process documents in multiple formats to enable activities such as onboarding new suppliers, receiving applications for loans or insurance claims. This results in large volumes of documents, the content of which is designed for human comprehension rather than machine processing. Extracting data from content is essential for document processing and the automated activities this supports. IDP solutions fulfill this role, augmented by and potentially replacing people. Documents are received in physical form, typically paper, which must be scanned for digitization, or in digital form, such as emails and PDFs. The content of these documents has varying layouts, ranging from structured formats, such as tabular or outline (e.g., list or hierarchy of headings) or invoices or contracts, to unstructured formats (i.e., free-flowing, such as an email). Layouts that fall between structured and unstructured, or mixing the two, are often referred to as semistructured.