05/08/2026
For many Thai and Southeast Asian operations, existing paperwork is a practical place to start with AI.
UOB’s 2026 Business Outlook Study surveyed 265 owners and senior executives from Thai small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In that sample, 71% said their businesses were deploying AI in operations. The survey does not show deployment depth, but it suggests that many SMEs are moving from whether to use AI to where it can remove work safely.
Invoices, receipts, purchase orders, applications and inspection sheets are useful candidates. Staff already recognise each type, find required fields, check rules, key data into another system and chase missing information. The work is visible enough to test.
Thai documents need their own evaluation. ThaiOCRBench, published in 2025, tested open-source vision-language models—systems that interpret images and text—without task-specific examples. Fine-grained text recognition and handwritten-content extraction showed the steepest performance drops. Its error analysis found models responding in the wrong language, losing document structure and inventing content not present.
Do not buy on a clean English demo. Build a representative pack of Thai and mixed-language documents. Include stamps, tables, handwriting, poor phone photos and unusual layouts. Measure every required field. Keep the original image beside the extracted data. Route uncertain fields to a person.
A business can begin this evaluation without a data team. It needs a process owner, representative examples, clear pass-or-review rules and a business system to receive the result.
Message the Page in Messenger to discuss how to evaluate a document workflow against these criteria.