What Is Docling? Transforming Unstructured Data for RAG and AI

Let's talk about one of the biggest missing pieces in retrieval augmented generation pipelines, or AI agents, because it's all about data preparation. Because in order for your model to provide better and more accurate responses, it needs to fully understand the data that you're using, right? Whether that data is formatted perhaps as a PDF, right Or maybe some type of table, image, audio, honestly, you name it, right? And that's exactly where Docling comes in. Docling is an open-source framework that allows you to process all kinds of files in a clean, structured text that large language models can actually use. Right. Because in most data heavy organizations, you're gonna encounter a variety of different file types, from those PDFs to Word files, PowerPoint ,scanned images and even spreadsheets. Right? But these are all types of unstructured data that need to be converted into a format, such as Markdown or plain text or JSON in order to be used in RAG or agentic workflows. And typical scripting and OCR can be quite tedious, right? But Docling is purpose-built for this exact situation. That's right. The real challenge in RAG or agentic AI isn't building the agent, but curating the knowledge and the context behind it. Today you'll learn all about Docling's document processing features from the Docling MCP server to structured information extraction and multimodal RAG, all features that you can start using today. let's get started. I'm glad you mentioned MCP or Model Context Protocol, because this is an open standard for our AI applications to integrate with external tools and data sources. So this is specifically for AI agents here. Um, now the thing is Docling's MCP server can plug directly into your favorite desktop client, like Claude desktop or LM Studio or Cursor. So, let's go ahead and draw this to be our MCP client. And I will establish a connection to the Docling MCP server. Right? So we'll have this running perhaps on our local machine. Uh. And this is the MCP, ah, server that will be used to actually transform our documents into that structured data that we need, so that we can do a call from our application to say, "Hey,