Field notes · August 13, 2026 · 1 min read
Why unstructured data is no longer a bottleneck
The Old Way
Historically, if a client sent you a 40-page PDF, a human had to read it and manually key the relevant fields into a database. This was the bottleneck of every operational team.
The New Way
Today, LLMs are exceptionally good at deterministic extraction. We can build a workflow that automatically reads the PDF, extracts exactly the 14 fields you care about, formats them into JSON, and pushes them to your CRM. The human only steps in to verify the output.