situation: You work in the operations team of a medium-sized company. Every day, your team processes order forms from different B2B customers. All of them arrive as PDFs. And in theory, they all contain the same information: customer ID, purchase order number, delivery date, and the ordered items.

In practice, however, every document looks slightly different: One customer places the purchase order number in the top-left corner, the next one in the bottom-right corner. Some write “PO Number”, others use “Order ID”, “Order Reference”, or something completely different.

For us humans, this is usually not a problem. We look at the document, understand the context, and immediately recognize which information is meant.

For traditional automation systems, however, this becomes difficult: A regex rule can specifically search for “PO Number: “ .…