At Trivos Labs, we help manage properties across the UAE through our flagship platform, Aqarratti. This means we deal with a lot of paperwork. One of our biggest challenges was how to quickly and accurately get information from official rental contracts (known as Ejari) into our system. Manually typing in every tenant’s name, rent amount, and contract date was slow and could lead to errors.
We needed an automatic solution.
The Obvious Plan, and The Big Roadblock
Our first thought was to use a popular tool from Amazon Web Services (AWS) called Textract. Think of it as a super-powered scanner that can not only read a document but also understand it. It seemed like the perfect fit.
But we hit a major wall: the service wasn’t available in the UAE.
This was a deal-breaker for several important reasons:
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Security and Compliance: For legal and privacy reasons, we must keep our customers’ data right here in the UAE.
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Speed: Sending data to servers halfway across the world and back would have slowed down our platform.
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Simplicity: Using a tool in another region would have made our system more complicated and expensive to run.
We were stuck. We couldn’t compromise on our commitment to data security, so we had to find another way.
Our Solution: A Smarter, Local Approach
Instead of building a complicated workaround, we asked a better question: “Could we create our own solution that’s even better than the tool we wanted in the first place?”
It turns out, the answer was yes. We built a new, smarter system right here in the UAE, and it works in two simple steps.
Step 1: Simply Read the Document
First, we needed a way to get all the words off the PDF page. We used a simple, reliable tool that does one thing perfectly: it instantly reads all the text from the contract. The best part? This happens entirely within our own secure system, so the document never leaves our control.
Step 2: Ask an AI to Understand It
This is where the magic happens. We take all that raw text and give it to a powerful Artificial Intelligence through AWS Bedrock, Amazon’s platform for cutting-edge AI models. Crucially, this advanced service is available right here in the UAE.
Instead of relying on a rigid template, we can now give the AI simple, plain-English instructions. We essentially tell it:
“Within each section, find all the key items of information and extract the corresponding value next to them”
The AI reads the document, understands the context, and hands back the exact information we need, perfectly structured. It’s the difference between a simple scanner and a smart assistant who can read and comprehend a document for you.
The Payoff: Faster, Cheaper, and More Accurate
What started as a frustrating problem turned into a huge win. Our new, custom-built solution is better in every way:
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More Accurate: The AI is brilliant at understanding the layout of different contracts, even those with mixed Arabic and English. This results in fewer errors.
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Extremely Cost-Effective: This method costs a tiny fraction of what a specialized service would, allowing us to keep our prices competitive.
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Faster: The entire process, from uploading the PDF to getting the structured data back, takes only a few seconds.
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Secure and Compliant: Most importantly, 100% of our data processing happens within the UAE, guaranteeing the highest levels of data privacy and compliance.
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More Flexible: If we want to start extracting a new piece of information from contracts tomorrow, we just update our instructions to the AI. No complex re-engineering is needed.
What We Learned
This journey taught us a valuable lesson: sometimes, the biggest limitations force you to be more creative. A roadblock that seemed like a disadvantage pushed us to build a solution that is not only more powerful but also perfectly tailored to the needs of our business and our customers in the UAE.
By thinking differently, we turned a challenge into a competitive advantage.