North American Optical Character Recognition Market, Forecast to 2024

While Traditional OCR is the Larger Segment in this Growing Market, AI OCR is Expected to Record Explosive Growth

This growth insight focuses on the North American optical character recognition (OCR) market. Revenue projections are derived from historical trends, bottom-up analysis of leading vendors, and modeled analysis of the impacts of various drivers and restraints during the forecast period across the North American region. The base year for the study is 2019, with forecasts provided up to 2024. Revenue for the total OCR market was derived as a cumulative sum of revenues recorded by the traditional OCR segment, Artificial Intelligence (AI) OCR segment, and local OCR vendors and homegrown solutions.

Optical character recognition is a technology that allows users to extract text from scanned documents, images, and videos and convert it into a digital format that is more searchable and easy to edit. The market is segmented into traditional OCR and AI OCR. AI OCR leverages Machine Learning-powered AI to contextually capture text and classify it with minimal human input.

In 2019, revenue growth in the North American OCR market was primarily driven by expansion in the AI OCR segment and increased accessibility through cloud deployments, mobile capture, and subscription-based pricing models. Market growth is also driven by other factors: including a preference among organizations to adopt OCR in order to reduce the time spent on data entry (which enables employees to focus on core operations), the need to identify and classify sensitive information in industries where compliance is critical, and the use of AI and Machine Learning (ML) to deliver improved accuracy. The market is restrained by factors such as intense competition among vendors eroding profit margins, fear of job loss among employees due to automation, and difficulties in customizing the OCR software (which implies that if a document deviates from the rules, the output could be unusable).

From an industry perspective, business and financial services (BFS), government and intelligence (G&I), retail, and healthcare are expected to lead adoption in this segment. Researchers also expect growing adoption in education, as managing student records and academic tasks both inside and outside the classroom becomes a greater priority.

OpenText, Kofax, and ABBYY emerged as the top vendors in the North American OCR market in 2019. OpenText is a leader in both traditional OCR and AI OCR segments. AI OCR is in a nascent stage of growth. While existing OCR market leaders have a first-mover advantage in the AI OCR segment, multinational technology giants such as Amazon and Google are also expanding their foothold in the market. The market is characterized by stiff competition among vendors, and strategic acquisitions to gain market share are expected to alter the competitive landscape over the forecast period.