4 Document Processing Trends and Predictions for 2025

Summary: In 2024, Apryse experienced significant progress with new product releases and partnerships. Key industry trends included digital transformation, generative AI integration, and enhanced accessibility compliance. Looking ahead to 2025, the focus in the industry as a whole may be on low-code/no-code development, enhanced automation, right-sizing AI, and vendor consolidation. These trends aim to streamline workflows, improve productivity, and simplify software development. 

It’s been a year full of exciting progress at Apryse, from exciting product releases to groundbreaking new partnerships that brought several new teams under the Apryse banner, helping to provide even more document processing technology to our customers. Today, let’s take a look back on 2024 and predict what may come next in the document processing industry.

Before we look at 2025, let's look back: 2024 saw a number of industry-wide trends, driven by advances in technology and changing user needs. A few major trends in the industry this past year included AI adoption, accessibility improvements, and more:

As a concept, digital transformation is nothing new – it’s been a focus for companies across industries and sectors for over a decade. However, in more industries including document-heavy areas such as healthcare, law, insurance, and finance, the tools and public awareness to bring paper-based workflows online and into digital, value-added formats continues to grow. As industry standards continue to shift to the digital, organizations lagging behind must adapt.

According to an IDP Market Analysis by InfoSource, paper documents still made up 40% of inputs to IDP solutions. While paper is declining in comparison to digital documents, it still remains part of the document processing landscape, showing that digital transformation is an ongoing journey.

2024 saw massive adoption of generative AI features incorporated into products and software in seemingly everything, and with the ability to summarize, manipulate and generate text content, document processing and document generation are popular use cases, helping with tasks like summarizing PDF content, detecting form fields, and as part of intelligent document processing (IDP) systems. These capabilities continue to shape processes and workflows in a variety of industries, making processes more efficient, changing workforces, and making information more readily accessible.

The standard web experience many of us are used to is a highly visual experience, with text, images, video and colors presenting information. For users with disabilities and different needs such as vision impairments or difficulty using a keyboard and mouse, much of the information on the web may not be accessible. With legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act, the European Accessibility Act 2025, and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, governments have made efforts to protect and include these users.

2024 saw new regulatory changes in the global market leading to increased adoption of WCAG standards, benefiting not only users with disabilities, but all users. For example, accessibility features such as contrast or keyboard navigation can benefit users with “temporary disabilities” such as lost glasses or a sprained wrist.

As we look ahead to the year that’s already upon us, these trends may be expected to influence the document processing landscape:

Generative AI has enabled people who say, “I can’t write!” to enhance their productivity on basic writing tasks like emails, summaries, and outlines. Similarly, low-code and no-code solutions allow teams without advanced technical skills to implement tools and software to meet a range of needs.

For example, Appian is a leading platform for process automation and optimization. For example, Appian may be used in the insurance industry to automate processes of claims processing, underwriting, and first notice of loss. Apryse offers an Appian plugin to enable document processing tasks to be incorporated into Appian’s powerful suite of tools.

According to a report from Gartner, 70% of new applications developed by organizations will use low-code or no-code technologies by 2025, up from less than 25% in 2020.

As Appian shows, process automation is continuing to become more accessible and user-friendly. Gone are the days when you might be the only person in your office who knew how to create a macro. Today, advanced yet approachable process automation tools not only make it easier to automate more tasks, but once teams begin to adopt automation for routine processes and tasks, individuals begin to spot more and more opportunities for automation and optimization.

For example, Apryse Template Extraction allows users to set up templates for structured form data, and automatically classify and extract form data to JSON.

Generative AI has seemingly been added to every application, from social media and Google to Microsoft Office, customer service experiences and more. As the technology continues to mature, 2025 may see changes to the way AI tools are added to your workflows, including more use in some areas and removal from others. As users become more aware of “hallucinations” or incorrect AI-generated text, we may see more targeted use of the technology.

 SDKs and libraries are essential tools for fast, reliable software development. But as features are added, SDKs and third-party tools can proliferate, until the project becomes mired in fees, incompatibilities and complexities. Software leaders are beginning to shift from the idea of finding “best of breed” solutions for every possible feature, to valuing vendor consolidation to simplify costs and compatibility.

Predictions are tricky, and the document processing industry moves fast. Keeping an eye on these trends for 2024 and 2025 may help your team stay ahead of the curve and maximize productivity in the new year.

To learn how Apryse can help you achieve your productivity goals this year, reach out to us!