Documents sit behind almost every business process, and most enterprises are about to learn the hard way that AI agents cannot reason about what they cannot read. Slavena Hristova, Director of Product Marketing for Document AI at ABBYY, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to explain how 35+ years of OCR and intelligent capture have positioned ABBYY as the “perception layer” for the agentic era. With 22 years inside ABBYY herself, Slavena walks Alan through the journey from scanning paper to reading meaning, why RPA bots taught the industry that documents break automation, and how AI agents amplify that risk at enterprise scale. She also lays out the LLM cost trap — “token maxing” on workloads that should never have hit a frontier model — and how guardrails and orchestration are reshaping how CIOs buy AI today.