Cinema schedules in.
Copy-pasting out.
Document AI and an automated data pipeline turn emailed cinema schedules into database entries, taking repetitive work off the team’s hands.
A Belgian cultural data platform with 28,000+ organisers and 215,000+ events a year
The challenge
A major cultural data platform in Belgium manages one of the largest event databases in the region: more than 28,000 organisers contribute over 215,000 events a year, from concerts and exhibitions to films and sports.
Every week, the organisation receives structured event schedules from cinemas by email. These reports contain detailed film programming that has to be added to the database.
At the time, this process was entirely manual: repetitive copy-pasting from email into the system, which took several hours of work every week.
The solution
To streamline this, we implemented an intelligent automation workflow, combining document AI and process automation to extract and process the data automatically.
We used Google Cloud's Document AI to analyse the email contents and extract the relevant film data. We combined this with automation in Google Workspace (Apps Script and AppSheet) to handle the full ETL process: retrieving the emails, transforming the extracted data and uploading it directly into the central event database.
The entire workflow runs as a fully automated pipeline, minimising manual effort and ensuring consistency.
The result
The weekly workload dropped from 2–3 hours to under 1 minute.
- Better data quality and consistency
- Built to scale, so it is easy to extend to other email types or contributors
The organisation now spends far less time on repetitive tasks and can focus on higher-value work.