AI’nt That Easy #33: IBM Docling with CrewAI and WatsonX

🔔 This tutorial is originally published at developer.ibm.com

Processing and analyzing documents efficiently can be challenging. Enter Docling, IBM’s cutting-edge document processing tool, which works seamlessly with Crewai, a collaborative agent-driven framework for complex task execution. In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to integrate WatsonX, IBM’s advanced AI platform, with Docling and Crewai to automate document analysis with highly intelligent agents. We’ll cover:

• An overview of Docling, Crewai, WatsonX, and related tools.
• A deep dive into the architecture.
• An example implementation.
• Key takeaways and conclusions.

Overview

Before diving into the implementation, let’s understand the core components:

IBM Docling

Docling is a robust document conversion and processing framework that handles multiple file formats (PDF, DOCX, etc.) and converts them into a unified structure called the Docling Document. Introduced in Docling v2, this Pydantic datatype enables consistent representation of text, tables, images, document hierarchy, and layout metadata.

Key Features:

• Multi-format support via pipelines for seamless processing of PDF, DOCX, and more.
• Customizable backends and options to adapt to specific use cases.