# We taught AI to read delivery orders. The AI was the easy part.

> Source: <https://dev.to/junhanpang/we-taught-ai-to-read-delivery-orders-the-ai-was-the-easy-part-4k93>
> Published: 2026-10-26 12:37:07+00:00

Every construction site runs on paper. Concrete, steel, diesel, rebar: each delivery comes with a signed delivery order (DO), and someone in the office has to key every one into the system, match it to the purchase order, and file the scan. At a busy contractor that's hours of work every week, and it's the kind of work nobody notices until it falls behind.

Over the past few months I set up an AI workflow at a Malaysian construction company to take that job over. Here's what it does and what I learned.

**The hard part isn't the AI, it's the paper.** Handwriting, stamps over text, carbon copies, photos taken at an angle. Most of the work was teaching the workflow what "good enough to trust" looks like.

**Letting the AI say "I'm not sure" is the most important feature.** People trust the system because it doesn't pretend. A short list of flagged items is easy to check; a system that is quietly wrong is worse than doing it by hand.

**Missing paperwork is as valuable as processed paperwork.** Once every DO is tracked, you get a daily list of what hasn't been scanned yet, so the office knows exactly what to chase from site.

**Start with one boring document.** Not a company-wide AI strategy. One document type, one folder, one list. Once that works, the next one (store transfers, diesel, claims) is much faster.

You don't need a big IT project to start. If your team spends hours keying paper into a system, that's where AI pays for itself first. I'm happy to share what worked.

*Pang Jun Han: operations & AI automation, founder of MyCreatorPulse. [pangjunhan.vercel.app](https://pangjunhan.vercel.app)*