A document tool's job isn't done when it produces a correct result on its own screen. It's done when that result is sitting in the format and place the user actually works in. The gap between those is where tools quietly fail.
The highest compliment a workflow tool can earn isn't 'I love using it.' It's that the user stops noticing it — because it fits the work so well it stopped being a separate step.
The extraction engine is increasingly a commodity. What's left as the durable product is the domain knowledge encoded around it — and that's the part a generic competitor can't copy.
Aggregate accuracy treats every field as equally important. The user doesn't. Where a tool spends its reliability should follow the cost of being wrong, not the count of fields.
The instinct is to extract every field a document contains. The more useful discipline is deciding which fields the tool should refuse to extract — and saying so.
For a professional, the output of a document tool isn't the end of the work — it's something they may have to defend to a client, a reviewer, or a counterparty. That changes what the output has to be.
There's a specific moment when a professional stops double-checking a tool and starts relying on it. Everything before that moment is a trial; everything that matters happens after. Most tools never get a user across it.
For a tool that processes confidential documents, the first question a serious buyer asks isn't about accuracy. It's where their document goes — and most tools answer it badly or not at all.
Attaching a confidence score to every extracted field feels like a transparency win. Uncalibrated, it's worse than nothing — it launders uncertainty into a number users can't act on.
Every extraction tool eventually produces a wrong answer a user catches. Whether the tool survives that moment is decided by design choices made long before it happens.