Microsoft Document Intelligence SDK Turns Scanned PDFs Into Structured Data for AI Pipelines

Microsoft's Document Intelligence SDK, formerly known as Form Recognizer, is a core but often overlooked component in AI document processing pipelines. The SDK offers two main clients: one for running document analysis and another for managing custom-trained models. It supports prebuilt models for common document types such as invoices, receipts, and IDs, as well as custom extraction models trained on user-labeled data. A classifier layer can route documents of unknown type to the appropriate model, making it practical for real-world pipelines that handle mixed document formats. The SDK can convert scanned PDFs into structured markdown, preserving headings and tables, which makes it particularly useful for retrieval-augmented generation applications.