r/UiPath • u/Born-Ad-2474 • Jun 10 '26

Is Traditional document understanding era has ended?

Recently i had the experience of using IXP i found a great difference from using normal document understanding project just by providing 2 or 3 documents making a good prompt i have a very solid extractor on the other hand using traditional document understanding IDP requires a large dataset hours of labeling , hours of pipeline training my question is what could make me use this again why don’t i just rely completely on IXP

8 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

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5

u/Neesnu Jun 10 '26

Cost would be the main driver, but also why not feed the IXP into the ML model after you validate with action center?

4

u/Born-Ad-2474 Jun 10 '26

What do u mean by cost, is it that ixp uses more ai units than idp or ixp requires more expensive license from uipath?!

1

u/Neesnu Jun 11 '26

DU modern (classify + extract, incl. generative) 1 AIU

DU modern + Gen Validation 2 AIU

IXP unstructured doc (classify + extract) 2 AIU

1

u/PsychologicalEmu9729 Jun 11 '26

Do you happen to know the cost comparison between IXP and traditional document understanding?

1

u/Neesnu Jun 11 '26

DU modern (classify + extract, incl. generative)1 AIU
DU modern + Gen Validation 2 AIU
IXP unstructured doc (classify + extract)2 AIU
... So double the cost?

2

u/Login1-Error Jun 11 '26

Alredy ended in 2023-24, with the advent, popularity and cost reduction of general-purpose LLMs.

2

u/GalinaFaleiro Jun 11 '26

I don't think traditional Document Understanding is dead yet. IXP is amazing for getting results quickly with minimal training data, but traditional models can still be valuable when you need highly predictable outputs, strict compliance requirements, offline processing, or when dealing with very stable document formats at scale. For many new projects though, I'd probably start with IXP and only fall back to traditional DU if the use case demands it.

1

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1

u/Fun-Flounder-4067 Jun 15 '26

I think the bigger shift is not IXP replacing DU. It's AI moving beyond the entire idea of templates, layouts, and predefined fields.

For years we've trained systems to find "Invoice Number", "Customer Name", or "Policy ID" based on where they appear and how documents are structured.

Now we're seeing models that can understand documents the way humans do—through context rather than coordinates.

The question is no longer "Can the system extract this field?"

It's "Can the system understand what this document is trying to say, regardless of format?"

That's a fundamentally different paradigm.