A great deal of useful information arrives not as typed text but as attached documents: a supplier's quote in PDF, a price list as a spreadsheet, a photo of a product. An AI agent able to read those formats directly extends its practical usefulness considerably.
Different formats, different challenges
A spreadsheet calls for interpreting a tabular structure, distinguishing headers from meaningful rows and columns. A PDF may contain extractable text or be a scan needing optical character recognition. An image calls for visual capability to interpret graphical content, not just text.
The concrete benefit for whoever prepares quotes
An agent that reads a supplier price list from a spreadsheet and compares it automatically against prices already in the system, or that pulls dimensions from an attached drawing, removes a manual transcription step that would otherwise take time and invite error.
The limits to bear in mind
Extraction quality depends on the quality of the original: a badly scanned PDF or a blurred image reduces the reliability of the interpretation. For critical data taken from documents of uncertain quality, a human check before acting on it remains a reasonable precaution.