Readout of massive Documents (17000 pdf) , Limitations and known Problems with PA and AI Builder Performance

[HansenvomDeich]

Hi,
I have the task of reading 17,000 PDF documents with the AI ​​Builder and storing them in a table.

There are 20 fields to be read per document and each document has one page.

What I'm missing is the experience of performance and limitations.

what I have found so far:
- signatures are not supported
- max. 360 Documents, each 60 seconds in AI Builder

my questions are:
-How many requests (parallel Power Automate flows) can I send to an AI Builder model at the same time?

-Is there a difference in performance depending on which license I use to run the Power Automate Flow? We have many licenses in the company, which would be the most performant for this project and why?

-Which source data storage has the best performance. Should I store the files in One Drive or Sharepoint Online or is there a more performant alternative?

- Anything Else what i have to take a Look on ? (Limitations in Power Automate maybe?)

Maybe you have more experience and can share it.

Many thanks in advance.

[samiak]

Hello,

You will find some answers about AI Builder questions below.

For Power Automate specifics, please post your questions here: General Power Automate Discussion - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com)

(a) We don't have a figure for the number of simultaneous calls that can be made to AI Builder, as it depends on a number of parameters. The best thing is to rely on your own experiments.

(b) As far as we know, there's no performance difference between licenses.

(c) We don't know if some data sources are faster than others, so it's best to experiment or ask people in power automate forum.

(d) Other things to note:

The predict time for a model can vary depending on the number of fields, the type of model (fixed-template or general), the geo, the size of the document (non-exhaustive list).

AI Builder Document Processing alone currently processes millions of pages per month for all our customers.

Hope that helps,

Thanks, 

Samia

[takolota]

@HansenvomDeich 

I’d imagine with that number of documents the AI Builder credit consumption must be really significant / high cost.

It may be worth checking out this alternative method that uses GPT prompts to extract the data: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Extract-Data-From-PDFs-and-Images-With-G...

It may also process faster at like 10-25s per document.

And if you have an Azure account for your org you could also use HTTP calls to an LLM service so each page would only cost you like $.001

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-services/openai-service/

Because alternatively 17,000 PDF pages with a custom document processing model would cost you $1000 for two AI Builder capacity add-ons: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ai-builder-calculator/

I’d also be willing to directly build something like this out for you at an hourly rate or at a percentage of costs saved.

[HansenvomDeich]

Thanks for the helpful tip and the link.

I watched a Video of Document Processing Custom Modell in Azure, do you think that the way to create labels and work with that modell in Power Automate is similar to the Modells which i trained and created in AI Builder?

[takolota]

The AI Builder models are likely Azure models under the hood with some tweaks to make them easier to use.

But if you can set up an Azure service & your documents fit one of their models, then that will likely be less expensive than AI Builder.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/document-intelligence/concept-model-overview?vie...