OCR is the first step in digitizing paper-heavy work such as invoices, delivery notes, identity documents and signed forms. Without it, those documents can only be read by a person, which keeps data entry manual.
OCR on its own produces text, not meaning. It can tell you the words on a page, but not which number is the invoice total or whether a required field is blank. That is the job of intelligent document processing, which adds AI on top. For example, OCR might read a scanned purchase order accurately while still leaving someone to find the order number by hand. Quality also drops with handwriting, low-resolution scans and complex tables.