Lesson 3 · 12 min
Document understanding — PDFs, tables, figures
The most-shipped multimodal workload in 2026. The patterns that turn a 30-page PDF with tables into structured data — without manual transcription.
Why this is the killer use case
Business runs on PDFs and scanned documents. Every team has invoices, contracts, lab reports, regulatory filings — content that's locked behind layout. Pre-multimodal, you needed:
- A PDF parser (poor on scanned docs).
- An OCR engine (Tesseract, Azure OCR).
- Layout analysis (find tables, figures, columns).
- A handful of regex + heuristics to glue the parts together.
Multimodal LLMs collapse this into one request that reads layout, OCRs text, parses tables, and answers a structured-output query — in a single pass.