A Large Language Model, or LLM for short, is an AI model that has been trained on very large amounts of text and has learned how language is structured. It recognizes patterns in phrasing, categorizes terms, and deduces what a text is about—without anyone having to provide it with fixed rules.
For document processing, this is the key difference from traditional text recognition. A rule-based system requires a separate configuration for each invoice template. A language model, on the other hand, can understand even a document it has never seen in this form before—a complaint written in free-form language, an invoice with an unfamiliar layout, or a termination notice without a subject line.
What matters here is not whether a model understands language. What matters is which model is used for which task, where it is deployed, and what happens to the data it processes.