AI agents can reason over enormous amounts of information, but much of the world’s actual work is still trapped in PDFs, spreadsheets, scans, and other formats that models struggle to reliably understand. Reducto co-founder and CEO Adit Abraham argues that solving this document layer is essential if agents are going to take on consequential work in healthcare, legal, finance, and insurance.
Adit joins a16z General Partner Jennifer Li to explain why traditional OCR breaks down on messy real-world documents, how Reducto combines vision-language models with specialized infrastructure to reach high accuracy without sacrificing cost or latency, and why frontier models can silently drop information on long extraction tasks. Reducto now processes billions of pages each month, including its seven billionth page the morning of the recording.
They also discuss Reducto’s R1 model, agents that can review and correct their own document extraction, and the company’s push beyond simply reading files toward letting agents reliably work with and edit them. Underneath it all is a higher-stakes problem: when a misread word can affect a healthcare claim or financial decision, getting the input right matters just as much as making the model smarter.
Resources:
Learn more about Reducto: https://reducto.ai
Follow Adit Abraham on X: https://x.com/aditabrm
Follow Jennifer Li on X: https://x.com/JenniferHli
Stay Updated:
Find a16z on YouTube: YouTube
Find a16z on X
Find a16z on LinkedIn
Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify
Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts
Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
