By coincidence, I've looked yesterday a small documentary [1] about the people tagging all those invoices to train theses models. For 120 €/month they are reading about 1000 to 4000 invoices per day and check and tag them for AI training.
I wonder what Sam's club is doing because their checker is using some sort of video based pre-check and sometimes they don't need to check you at all. Still, everything is scanned ahead of time by you or the cashier. Once I did forget to scan an item and they noticed.
Thanks was a good watch. Sad though the example of the AI app to “help farmers” that is making things up. I would expect a generational cassava farmer to have a much better sense of how to treat the plants than an image model.
Oh no! The ones working at 120€/month are the happy few. This is above mid range income in Madagascar. I just wanted to point out that this is not all automated running on GPUs. There are people involved, more than I thought before viewing this video.
OCR based invoice recognition has been a solved problem for well over a decade. Source: I've consulted for a company doing that. No exploitation. No LLMs. Just clever engineering.
In my neck of the woods, B2B invoices are now required to be delivered over the Peppol network in UBL format, which further improves reliability.
Doesn't necessarily eliminate the need for an accountant, because the chosen UBL standard has lots of room for interpretation and ambiguity, and it's impossible to uniformly decide how process an invoice based on the invoice alone (e.g. is this deductible? is this even a business expense at all? which ledger should this go in? etc).