Document infrastructure lags as AI goes mainstream

PEX Network’s key takeaways:

• While artificial intelligence (AI) has gone mainstream, most enterprises are still struggling with the document data governance needed to scale it.
• Apryse survey finds that 64.5 percent of enterprises have AI in production, yet only 38.1 percent rate their document data as ‘excellent.’
• Traditional data shared between documents tends to be messy, inconsistent, and hard for AI to interpret.

A new global survey has revealed that 64.5 percent of enterprises have AI in production, yet only 38.1 percent rate their document data as “excellent,” exposing a critical gap in AI readiness.

The Apryse global survey on AI adoption and document infrastructure reveals a striking paradox: while AI has gone mainstream, most enterprises are still struggling with the document data governance needed to scale it.

Traditional data shared between documents tends to be messy, inconsistent, and hard for AI to interpret. While humans can manually vet the data, this is unsustainable for most companies. Without intelligent pre-processing, these documents remain unstructured, making automation and accurate insights increasingly challenging.

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AI goes mainstream, document infrastructure lags behind

The survey of 465 organizations across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand uncovered key insights: 

• 64.5 percent of organizations already run AI in production, largely for enhancing operational efficiency (63 percent), improving customer experience (51 percent), and making data-driven decisions (41 percent).
• 76.6 percent store between 25 percent and 75 percent of their data in documents, yet just over a third rate that data as excellent for AI use.
• 67.3 percent say keeping document processing in-house is extremely important, while 54 percent cite data security concerns as the top barrier to scaling AI.
• 82.8 percent plan to invest in document automation within the next 12 months, but nearly half lack confidence in their current pipelines.
• 62.8 percent experience document quality issues occasionally or frequently.

“AI is no longer experimental, it’s operational,” commented Andrew Varley, CPO at Apryse. “Enterprises are discovering that the infrastructure behind it, especially around document data quality, hasn’t evolved fast enough. Surging data growth without governance, a lack of visibility into what content already exists, and fragmented tooling are now the biggest barriers to intelligent processing at scale.”

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Oceania outpaces the West in AI infrastructure

The survey also highlights a growing demand for tools that go beyond digitization. Organizations need solutions that extract meaning and structure from documents, not just text.

While North America leads in AI deployment (77.7 percent), Australia and New Zealand quietly outpaced the West in infrastructure maturity. These respondents report the highest adoption of generative AI and predictive AI, hybrid cloud usage, and optical character recognition, (OCR) technologies, signaling a global shift in innovation.

“Oceania is outpacing the West in several key areas of AI infrastructure,” added Varley. “The region has been an early-adopter of data residency rules and regulatory mandates, pushing organizations to embrace hybrid cloud and advanced document processing. With highly-regulated industries like healthcare, government, and financial services dominating the market in Oceania, this urgency has created a solid model for accurate document-to-data workflows.”

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