Automate data extraction from just about any PDF with Cradl AI

By 2025, automating PDF data extraction with AI should be a top priority for any business still relying on manual data entry to exchange data between services.

In this post, we’ll show you how to set up an end-to-end, automated data extraction workflow for just about any PDF document in 3 simple steps.
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Set up your Cradl AI model with a few clicks

Before we begin, make sure you’ve created a Cradl AI account.‍

Once you're inside the app, your first step is to create an AI model that understands your documents. In Cradl AI, creating an AI model simply equates to making a list of the data points you want to extract from your documents.

Take Bills of lading as an example: you might want to extract data points such as  bill of lading number, carrier name, vessel name, port of loading, and so on.
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Alternatively, if you have a common document type, like invoices, clone our corresponding template model then add or remove fields according to your needs.

Extract data from your first PDF document

With your AI model set up, you're ready to extract data from your first document:

• Click on «Run» from your dashboard and upload your documents.
• Wait for your AI model to process them. Once processed, you can review the extracted data in the «Validator»
• Make any corrections if necessary, and finalise the extracted output as JSON by clicking «Validate»

Below is an example of data extracted from a bill of lading. The location source of each piece of extracted data is conveniently highlighted on the PDF.
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Notice the orange confidence scores. These indicate areas where the AI requires human review (human-in-the-loop) before it finalises the data export.

Use your Cradl AI model to automate data entry workflows

Manual document upload becomes increasingly time-consuming at scale. Besides, we want to send our extracted JSON data somewhere, such as an Excel sheet or an ERP system.

Fortunately, Cradl AI makes it incredibly easy to integrate its data extraction models into most workflows without writing a single line of code.

Cradl AI follows a «Trigger» and «Export» workflow pattern. Data extraction of a document is triggered by an external event, such as inbound email attachments or one of our third party integrations.
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Once data has been extracted from a document, Cradl AI uses the extraction confidence scores to evaluate whether human review is required or not, and finally exports the data to a variety of integrations, such as webhooks, APIs, or the aforementioned third-party integrations.

That's all it takes to set up end-to-end, automated data extraction from just about any PDF with Cradl AI.

Summary

While «Automating document workflows» might sound like a project that requires weeks of labour, most of our users are extracting data from hundreds of PDF pages after just a few days of tinkering with Cradl AI.

By creating an AI model that understands your PDFs and hooking it up with your inbound source of documents, Cradl AI is guaranteed to improve the automation degree of just about any business still relying on manual data entry.