Announcing the Doc Chat API: Bringing Advanced Document Intelligence to Every Application

For years, application developers have faced a stubborn challenge: how to bring advanced document intelligence and processing into their products without investing months — or even years — in specialized development. Documents remain the backbone of how businesses operate, yet extracting meaning and value from them has historically been complex, costly, and slow.

Today, we are excited to announce the Doc Chat API, a new way for developers to embed advanced, AI-driven document functionality directly into their applications. With Doc Chat API, developers gain access to highly customized document workflows that we configure to their exact needs — typically within just a week or two. The result is a dramatic acceleration in development speed, reduced complexity, and a pathway to new features that unlock market opportunities.

The Developer Challenge: Why Document Intelligence Is So Hard

Adding document intelligence into an application sounds straightforward at first. But as any developer who has attempted it knows, the complexity mounts quickly.

The first hurdle is digitization. Documents come in all shapes and sizes: PDFs, Word files, scanned pages, image-heavy reports. Each requires different techniques to reliably convert into usable text. Even then, the documents themselves are often messy — with tables, images, footnotes, and formatting quirks that can break naive approaches.

Then comes the second hurdle: scale and document intelligence at enterprise level. Once digitized, performing sophisticated tasks over hundreds or thousands of pages is a major technical undertaking. Developers must master both infrastructure and AI techniques, stringing together toolkits, building custom models, and maintaining pipelines that rarely work perfectly on the first try.

As we put it:

Adding complex AI-driven document handling functionality in an application is very complicated. You have to deal with digitization, and the way to do that ranges dramatically depending on the file type. Then you need to perform highly complex tasks across thousands of pages. We’ve spent years perfecting this platform, so developers don’t have to.

The result is that many teams spend months — even quarters — just to get a minimum viable feature into production. For smaller teams, or those outside of AI-heavy industries, the investment is often prohibitive.

What the Doc Chat Document Processing API Brings

Doc Chat API changes this equation. Instead of forcing developers to reinvent the wheel, we provide a ready-to-use, customized document processing API solution.

Here’s how it works:

1. Define the Task – A client describes the document workflow they want to automate, whether it’s extracting structured data, answering questions, or summarizing long reports.
2. We Build the Preset – In about a week, we configure a tailored preset using our platform, honed over years of development.
3. Access via API – Developers simply call the Doc Chat API to access that functionality at scale.

Unlike off-the-shelf document APIs that function as toolkits requiring significant expertise to stitch together, Doc Chat API is designed as plug-and-play intelligence. Developers don’t need to worry about the underlying complexity. They just integrate the API and start delivering value to their users.

Real-World Document Intelligence Use Cases

The potential applications for document intelligence using Doc Chat API span nearly every industry.

1. Contract Management: Imagine a system that stores thousands of client contracts. With Doc Chat API, developers can add the ability to extract structured data from all those contracts in seconds, giving clients unprecedented visibility. They could also enable the system to respond to RFPs using past submissions as a reference point — a complex task that becomes accessible in weeks instead of years.
2. Insurance & Financial Services: These industries are built on paper-heavy workflows. Policies, claims, and disclosures can now be processed automatically with a document processing API, freeing teams from manual review and enabling faster client service.
3. Construction & Utilities: From permits to project reports, document-heavy industries can digitize and analyze paperwork at scale, accelerating operations that previously relied on manual review.

As we noted:

Something that used to take weeks is now taking two minutes. It’s very hard for people to go back. That’s why we’ve invested so much in making this reliable at scale.

In short, anywhere documents are the source of truth — and in many industries, they are the only source of truth — Doc Chat API offers transformative potential.

Why Nomad’s Document Processing API Is Different

Off-the-shelf document processing APIs generally focus on one thing: digitization. They extract text and, in some cases, structured fields. But they remain toolkits — requiring developers to build complex systems around them, master AI intricacies, and manage infrastructure at scale.

With Doc Chat API, developers bypass that complexity entirely. The API delivers finished, customized functionality, not just building blocks.

We’ve been able to achieve this because of the years we’ve invested in:

1. Advanced Digitization – Routing different types of pages to the right engines, combining multiple methods, and ensuring accuracy across diverse document types.
2. Configurable Intelligence – Our platform includes a configuration language with over 40 different parameters, enabling nearly infinite combinations to handle specialized tasks.
3. Enterprise Scalability – Reliability, fault tolerance, and the ability to run thousands of processes simultaneously. Once clients start relying on this, it quickly becomes mission critical.

The result is a system that allows developers to focus not on the complexity of AI, but on how to package, monetize, and deliver new features to their customers.

A Document Intelligence Partnership Model

Another key difference is the way we deliver Doc Chat API. This isn’t a static product with fixed endpoints and slow updates. It’s a partnership.

When a client comes to us, we work closely to understand their needs, build a tailored preset, and deliver it back as an API. We don’t charge for that customization. Instead, clients pay on a usage-based model, allowing them to scale as their adoption grows.

This collaborative approach means developers can go from idea to live functionality in a matter of weeks, without making heavy upfront investments in expertise or infrastructure.

The Bigger Picture: The Future of AI in Applications

The launch of Doc Chat API signals a broader shift in how AI is being productized for developers.

The first wave of AI brought generic models and toolkits — powerful but limited in how directly they could solve industry-specific problems. The next wave, which we are helping lead, is about domain-specific intelligence delivered via API.

Developers no longer need to choose between spending months building custom AI or settling for generic functionality. With solutions like DocChat API, they can access highly specialized intelligence that feels native to their applications — without the overhead of building it themselves.

As we put it:

“Every day I hear about new developers wanting to embed this type of functionality in their applications, but they don’t know how. Starting today, we’re partnering with these folks to completely change the development process and speed things up.”

Conclusion

Documents remain at the heart of business, but until now, the ability to truly unlock their value with scalable document intelligence has been out of reach for many developers. With the launch of Doc Chat API, we’re changing that.

By turning years of investment into a plug-and-play service, we are giving developers the tools to build smarter, faster, and more capable applications. Whether in finance, insurance, utilities, or any other document-heavy industry, Doc Chat API represents a step-change in how applications handle information.

We believe this is just the beginning. As developers adopt Doc Chat API, they won’t just be making their workflows faster — they’ll be reshaping what’s possible in their industries.

The future of applications is intelligent, document-aware, and powered by document intelligence built in weeks — not years. And with Doc Chat API, that future starts today.

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FAQs

• What is a document processing API? A document processing API lets developers embed advanced capabilities like data extraction, classification, and summarization directly into their applications. Instead of building custom pipelines, teams can integrate a single API that handles complex workflows at scale using Nomad's Doc Chat.
• ‍How does document intelligence differ from OCR? OCR converts images or PDFs into text, but document intelligence goes further. Doc Chat interprets the content — identifying entities, extracting structured fields, summarizing reports, and even answering questions across thousands of pages.
• ‍Why use a document processing API instead of building in-house? Building a custom document processing API requires deep expertise in AI, infrastructure, and scaling pipelines. It can take months or years to reach production. Using a prebuilt, configurable API like Nomad's Doc Chat accelerates time-to-market and reduces risk.
• ‍What industries benefit most from document intelligence? Insurance, finance, legal, and any other industries that are especially document-heavy. Doc Chat helps these industries automate claims, review contracts, analyze disclosures, and process permits — turning weeks of manual work into minutes.
• ‍Is a document processing API secure for sensitive data? Yes. Modern document processing APIs like Doc Chat's are designed with enterprise-grade security.