The Challenge

A major cultural data platform in Belgium manages one of the largest event databases in the region, with over 28,000 organizers contributing more than 215,000 events annually, from concerts and exhibitions to films and sports.

Each week, the organization receives structured event schedules from cinemas via email. These reports contain detailed film programming that must be added to their database.

At the time, this process was entirely manual, involving repetitive copy-pasting from email into the system — and required several hours of work each week.

The Solution

To streamline this effort, we implemented an Intelligent Automation (IA) workflow, combining document AI and process automation to extract and process data automatically.

We used Google Cloud’s Document AI to analyze the email contents and extract relevant film data. This was combined with automation in Google Workspace (using App 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, minimizing manual effort and ensuring consistency.

The Result

This intelligent automation drastically improved efficiency:

• The weekly workload dropped from 2–3 hours to under 1 minute

• Data quality and consistency improved

• The solution was built to scale, making it easy to extend to other email types or contributors

Thanks to this setup, the organization now spends significantly less time on repetitive tasks and can focus on higher-value work.