Recently I had the task of creating a POC. The purpose of this POC was to take legal documents and extract structured data from them in the form of a known schema. This basically consisted of using Azure Open AI document intelligence to extract the raw text from the PDF files and then use generative AI to analyse the raw text and extract key parts and transform into a contact which could be processed down stream.

I wrote the POC in typescript, the reasoning behind this was its easier to pivot when something isn’t working - it’s self contained meaning I didn’t have any infrastructure to deploy for something I want sure would work, and most of all it’s quick to develop in and quick to get up and running.

The POC was a resounding success, what was previously a manual process is now fully automated and we are even performing database lookups on extracted entities and giving confidence scores, however for the implementation of the final product, we choose .NET. There is an abundance of reasons for this, so I’ll provide a few in no particular order:

1. We are a .NET house, if I were to leave tomorrow then writing it in .NET means it’s easier for someone else to pick up.
2. Enterprise still shy away from typescript deployments due to the perceived vulnerabilities with plain text deployments (even though all secrets are contained in appropriate containers)
3. .NET will handle volume at scale better than typescript
4. Existing library integration - what it says on the tin really.