In the late 1960s, the first OCR (optical character recognition) techniques turned scanned documents into raw text. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon provide high-quality OCR as part of their cloud services offerings. But documents remain underused in software toolchains, and valuable data languish in PDFs. The challenge has shifted from identifying text in documents to turning them into structured data suitable for direct consumption by software-based workflows or direct storage into a system of record. The best way to turn the vast majority of documents into. structured data is to use a next generation of powerful, flexible templates that find data in a document much as a person would.