Choosing a document AI tool for your team

The work is recurring, not one-off

Most document tools are bought for a single task — convert this file, extract this table — and then quietly stop being used, because the task was a one-off. The tools that stick are pointed at work that comes back every week: proposals, monthly reports, client decks, invoices, and the pile of PDFs nobody wants to retype.

So the first question is not which tool, but which recurring task. Name the task and the person who does it today, then compare tools against that.

The checklist

• Retention — can you state in one sentence where a client document is stored and how long it stays? If the answer is not written down anywhere, that is the answer.
• Deletion — can the person who uploaded a file remove it, and does that take effect straight away?
• Format fidelity — does the output open in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint as a real editable file, with tables and headings intact?
• Language coverage — if anyone on the team works in Arabic or Hebrew, does right-to-left text survive the round trip?
• Access — is it browser-based, or does every person need an install and a licence before they can try it?
• Pricing shape — per seat or per use? Five people converting a few files each is a different buying decision from one team processing hundreds.
• Scope — what the tool does not do matters as much as what it does. Nobody wants to find the boundary mid-project.

The cost of the manual route

Manual document work is easy to under-count, because it is spread across people and never appears on an invoice. The visible task is a conversion; the real cost is the reading, the retyping, the reformatting, and the review pass afterwards — multiplied by everyone who touches the file.

Run the numbers on one recurring task: hours per week, times the number of people involved, times a loaded hourly rate. Most teams find the total is larger than they expected, and that a good part of it is formatting rather than thinking.

Where DocLique fits

DocLique is a document studio: one conversation covers reading the file, asking about it, transforming it, and producing the output. For team work, the parts that matter are the ones that survive a handover.

• Summaries with citations — each claim points back to the page it came from, so a reviewer can check it in seconds.
• Tables and numbers extracted straight into a spreadsheet instead of being retyped.
• Real .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx output that keeps fonts, colours, and layout.
• Native RTL layout for Arabic and Hebrew, including bilingual decks.
• Scanned documents and photos handled by OCR first, so a poor scan does not block the job.

What to quote to a client

Retention is usually the first question a client asks, and the answer here is short enough to repeat: files on the Free plan are deleted automatically 7 days after upload, and upgrading does not extend that window. On paid plans, files are kept until you delete them, and for 7 days after a plan ends. Deleting a file removes it from active storage, and no separate backup copies are kept. While a document is being processed, temporary copies live on the processing servers and are deleted automatically within about three hours after the session ends.

Rolling it out

Start on the free plan with one real recurring task, not a demo file. Give it to the person who does that work today and see whether the output saves them the formatting pass. If it does, pick a plan by volume: 600 credits a month on Basic covers a light individual workload, while 1,800 on Pro and 5,000 on Max suit heavier use. Extra credits are a one-time purchase on any plan, so a busy month does not force a plan change.

Two things to plan around. There is no shared team workspace, so accounts are per person and files belong to whoever uploaded them. And DocLique is not a PDF editor — it does not redact, annotate, or add signatures. If those are requirements, keep the tool you already use for them and put DocLique alongside it for the reading, extraction, and conversion work.

How to decide

Judge it on one recurring task and one real file. If the tool removes the formatting pass and the retyping, it earns its place; if it only changes a file extension, a converter is cheaper. Everything else on a feature list is a detail you can evaluate later.