Agents that run your document lifecycle
From the moment a contract, claim, invoice, or record arrives, an agent reads it, classifies it, extracts what matters, files it correctly, and keeps it compliant for as long as the law requires — and not a day longer.
- Intake, classification & extraction
- Retention schedules & legal holds
- Human review on high-risk docs
- Full disposition audit trail
Records are a liability until they're managed
Every document is also a compliance obligation.
Most organizations don't have a document problem — they have a document-lifecycle problem. Files land in shared drives, inboxes, and scanning queues, get half-named and mis-foldered, and then sit there. Some are subject to seven-year retention. Some should have been destroyed two years ago. Nobody can tell which is which without opening them.
That ambiguity is expensive in two directions. Keep too little and you fail an audit, lose a dispute, or breach a records statute. Keep too much and you balloon storage, widen your breach surface, and hand discovery counsel a haystack. The work of sorting it out is exactly the kind of high-volume, rule-bound, judgment-light labor that drains skilled staff.
Agentic automation closes the gap by treating each document as a small workflow: read it, decide what it is, do the right thing with it, and prove what was done. The hard part was never reading the page — it was acting on it consistently, at volume, with a record you can defend.
What the agents actually do
Each runs as a governed workflow with extraction confidence, policy checks, and human checkpoints wired in.
Intake & classification
Ingest from email, scan, upload, or API; detect document type and matter; split combined PDFs into discrete records and route each one.
Extraction & indexing
Pull parties, dates, amounts, clauses, and identifiers; normalize them; index every record so search returns the document, not a folder.
Retention & disposition
Apply the right retention rule on file, track destruction eligibility, honor legal holds, and propose disposition with the policy citation attached.
Audit & lineage
Log every read, classification, extraction, and move so you can reconstruct who-did-what to any record for an auditor or opposing counsel.
Exception handling
Flag low-confidence fields, unexpected clauses, and missing signatures to a reviewer queue — with the agent's reasoning shown for context.
System-of-record sync
File into your DMS, ECM, CRM, or matter system through their APIs, so the canonical copy lives where your teams already work.
One document, end to end
What happens between a file arriving and a defensible record sitting in your system.
Capture
The agent ingests the document from any channel, deduplicates it, and splits multi-record bundles into individual items.
Understand
It classifies the type, extracts the fields that matter, and scores confidence on each one against your thresholds.
Act
It applies retention and hold policy, files into the system of record, and routes anything uncertain to human review.
Account
It writes a full lineage entry — source, decisions, edits, and disposition — so every record is audit-ready by default.
Defensible, not just fast
Speed is the easy win. The reason document automation stalls in regulated shops is trust: legal, records, and compliance teams won't let an unsupervised model decide what to keep or destroy. So we don't ask them to. Policy lives in code the agent must check, destruction always requires the rule that authorizes it, and a single active legal hold overrides every disposition path.
High-risk classes — executed contracts, anything under hold, regulated forms — carry mandatory human approval before they're filed or purged. Everything the agent reads, infers, or moves is logged with timestamps and reasoning, so an audit becomes a query instead of a fire drill.
- Retention & legal holds enforced before any disposition
- Mandatory review on high-risk document classes
- Tamper-evident lineage for every record action
Document tooling vs. a document agent
Why action and accountability are a different category from capture.
| Traditional DMS / IDP | An Automatic.co agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Stores and extracts | Reads, decides, files, and retains |
| Classification | Rules and templates you maintain | Learns your types, improves from corrections |
| Retention | Manual tagging, often skipped | Policy enforced on file, holds honored |
| Exceptions | Land in a queue, unexplained | Routed with the agent's reasoning attached |
| Audit | Reconstructed after the fact | Lineage written as work happens |
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from OCR or an IDP tool we already license?
OCR and intelligent document processing stop at extraction — they hand you fields and a confidence score. Our agents take action on what they read: they classify the record, apply the right retention rule, file it in the system of record, open the exception when a clause looks off, and log every step. The OCR engine is one tool the agent calls, not the whole job.
What about documents the model gets wrong?
Extraction confidence is scored per field, and anything below your threshold — or any document of a class you flag as high-risk — routes to a human reviewer before it touches a system of record. The agent never silently files a low-confidence contract or a misread invoice. Corrections feed back as labeled examples so accuracy compounds over time.
Can it enforce our retention schedule and legal holds?
Yes. Retention rules, destruction eligibility, and active legal holds are encoded as policy the agent checks before it files, archives, or proposes deletion. A held record is never purged, every disposition is logged with the rule that authorized it, and you get a defensible audit trail for regulators or opposing counsel.
Where does our content actually live during processing?
Inside your perimeter. We deploy in your VPC, on-prem, or air-gapped, and documents are processed where your data is already governed. No content is shipped to a third-party cloud unless your policy explicitly allows it, and you can run open models for the most sensitive classes.
Related industry workflows
Document-heavy operations we automate next door.
Pick your messiest document workflow.
Bring one high-volume record type and we'll map the agent, the policy checks, and the review gates that make it defensible.