AI Dev 26 x SF | Jerry Liu: My Agent Can't Read a PDF?

The future of automating knowledge work depends on AI agents that can reliably read and understand documents — but today's agents struggle with complex layouts, tables, and visual elements. This talk by LlamaIndex' Jerry Liu explores why document parsing remains a critical bottleneck for agentic workflows and introduces new open-source innovations to address it, including ParseBench, a benchmark for evaluating document OCR quality for AI agents, and LiteParse, a fast VLM-free parser. It also covers LlamaParse, purpose-built to deliver the best agentic understanding of complex documents at scale.