Document Intelligence Is a Stack (Not a Feature)

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Document intelligence is often marketed like a single product feature. It isn’t.

It’s a stack:

  1. OCR and text recognition
  2. Layout reconstruction
  3. Table extraction
  4. Structured output generation
  5. LLM reasoning and extraction

Each layer depends on the one below it. If OCR is weak, layout breaks. If layout breaks, tables fail. If tables fail, downstream reasoning becomes unreliable.

You don’t solve document AI at the top of the stack. You solve it by building a stronger foundation.