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Introduction

Welcome to the user manual of Expert.ai EI-Flow.

EI-Flow

EI-Flow is the component of EidenAI Suite that enables organizations to design, deploy and execute document analysis workflows. It combines a visual multi-user Web application for managing workflows with runtime services that expose those workflows through REST APIs for programmatic use.

In EI-Flow, a published workflow is an executable pipeline that synchronously or asynchronously analyzes a document—or a batch of documents—by coordinating one or more models with pre-processing and post-processing blocks.

A special case is that of similarity: EI-Flow can be equipped with indexing and searching capabilities to find documents "like this," so one workflow can be used to analyze documents using a model and index the results of the analysis while another workflow can be used to query the index to find documents similar to a given document based on the comparison of analysis results.

The models can be predictive linguistic models—either symbolic or hybrid-ML—developed with other components of EidenAI Suite, LLMs and document interpretation models provided by Expert.ai or external models accessible via LiteLLM.

EI-Flow workflows can also act as MCP tools for other AI models.

EI-Flow provides out-of-the-box components to direct the flow within the workflow (parallel branches, conditional branches), define loops, execute pre- and post-processing scripts, extract text from documents with optional OCR, recognize languages, etc. Custom components to perform any task, including interactions with external services, can be developed with the dedicated SDK.

EI-Flow is offered as a SaaS or deployed on premises.

Workflow's computing capacity can automatically scale up and down based on the incoming traffic to reach the best balance between performance and hosting costs.

EI-Flow can push notifications to an external Web service when a workflow has completed its work; the customization for the specific service is usually easy to implement.

This manual

This manual has two sections:

The REST API that allows you to use workflows programmatically is described in a separate manual.