Why OCR projects need human review from day one

OCR work is tempting because the happy path looks magical: scanned paper becomes rows in a CSV. The problem is that the hard cases are exactly the cases that matter.

The right design is not “automate everything.” It is “automate what is reliable, flag what is uncertain, and make review cheap.”

That lesson carries into AI engineering too. A model output is only useful if the system around it can validate, route, and explain uncertainty.