Cloudmersive Document AI offers a powerful suite of tools capable of both enhancing and greatly simplifying our document processing workflows in Power Automate.

Today, we’re continuing our series of Document AI walkthroughs by exploring Document AI’s barcode extraction capabilities in a short example Power Automate flow.

Cloudmersive Document AI Barcode Extraction

The Document AI API was launched at the tail end of 2025, and it’s now ready to be imported to Power Automate as a custom connector. Once imported, powerful Document AI actions like Extract Barcodes from a Document using AI can be implemented into both new and existing workflows with ease.

In this article, we’ll walk through a very simple Power Automate flow which takes advantage of Document AI’s barcode extraction capabilities to extract the barcode type and value from a barcode image on an example file. Our example file will be an invoice document with a QR barcode that encodes the invoice payment link.

We’ll now take a quick look at the barcode extraction API response model to better understand how our returned barcode information is structured.

{
  "Successful": true,
  "BarcodeResults": [
    {
      "BarcodeType": "string",
      "BarcodeValue": "string"
    }
  ]
}

As shown above, the response JSON stores barcode types and values as independent objects within a ”BarcodeResults” array. This means we can extract an unlimited number of barcodes from any given document.

Uploading a Custom Document AI Connector to Power Automate

Before we get started, we’ll first address that the Document AI connector must be uploaded to Power Automate as a custom connector at this time. We’re working on making the Document AI API available as a premium connector in the Power Automate library, but we’re not quite there yet.

To upload any Cloudmersive API to Power Automate as a custom connector, we’ll need to 1) upload the API specification to the power platform via JSON file or OpenAPI URL and 2) set a host endpoint and base path in the General information tab of the custom connector editor.

If we’re a Cloudmesrive customer using a private or managed instance endpoint, we can use that endpoint as the host in our custom connector to take full advantage of our deployed infrastructure in Power Automate.

Extracting Barcodes in a Power Automate Flow

After we’ve successfully created our Document AI custom connector, we’ll begin building our barcode extraction workflow.

As mentioned, we’ll keep things extremely simple so it’s easy to test our flow with one or multiple example documents. We’ll build an Instant Cloud Flow with a manual file input trigger.

As a first step, we’ll open the Manually trigger a flow box, click Add an input, and select the File input option.

Next, we’ll add a new action and navigate to the Custom connector tab. We’ll find all the connectors we upload here, including our custom Document AI connector.

After we select our Document AI connector, we’ll locate and select the Extract Barcodes from a Document using AI action. We’ll find this action on the top right portion of the actions list.

We’ll now configure this action’s parameters.

Here, we’ll pass down dynamic content from our Manually trigger a flow step into the InputFile/body and InputFile (file name) fields. We’ll ignore the RecognitionMode parameter, which is set to Advanced recognition mode by default (the other option is Normal which sacrifices accuracy for speed to some degree).

At this point, we’ve completed all the steps required to test Document AI barcode extraction capabilities in a Power Automate workflow. We’ll now save our flow and run a test with our example document.

After our flow finishes running, we’ll click on our barcode extraction action and select Show raw outputs to view our API response.

In our response body, we’ll find our QR code type and link value accurately stored in our singular ”BarcodeResults” array object.

In one quick step, we extracted a barcode from our example invoice and returned the encoded URL as plain text in our flow. Since the URL is well-formed, we can immediately navigate to the URL endpoint or share it with a flow stakeholder in our Accounts Payable department.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned how to easily extract barcodes from a document using the Document AI Extract Barcodes from a Document using AI action. Our example flow returned the QR code from our example invoice document with an accurately identified barcode type and a well-formed URL path.

Including Document AI in our Power Automate workflows instantly improves our ability to process important document contents without any human intervention. With Document AI, we can easily extract key barcode information as a quick pitstop in an otherwise lengthy and complex enterprise workflow.

For expert advice on using the Cloudmersive Document AI API in Power Automate, please reach out to a Cloudmersive representative.