Databricks: 'PDF parsing for agentic AI is still unsolved' — new tool replaces multi-service pipelines with single function

There is a lot of enterprise data trapped in PDF documents. To be sure, gen AI tools have been able to ingest and analyze PDFs, but accuracy, time and cost have been less than ideal. New technology from Databricks could change that.The company this week detailed its "ai_parse_document" technology, now integrated with Databricks' Agent Bricks platform. The technology addresses a critical bottleneck in enterprise AI adoption: Approximately 80% of enterprise knowledge remains locked in PDFs, reports and diagrams that AI systems struggle to accurately process and understand."It's a common assumption that parsing PDFs is a solved problem, but in reality, it isn't," Erich Elsen, principal research scientist at Databricks, told VentureBeat. "The challenge isn't just that documents are unstructure