From Paper Documents to Structured Data: How I Built an AI Onboarding Agent in a Week

Submitted for the Gemini Live Agent Challenge #GeminiLiveAgentChallenge There's a version of this post where everything goes smoothly. Where I open the Gemini docs, integrate the Live API in an afternoon, and ship a polished product by day three. This is not that post. This is the honest one — about the planning that saved the project, the APIs that didn't work, and how six versions of a working product shipped in a single day. Because that's actually what happened. The Problem I Wanted to Solve I support my wife in running a small wellness business. Every time we hire someone new, the same thing happens: A picture or a paper ID card gets handed over, someone manually types the data into a spreadsheet, someone else copies it into another system, and at least one field ends up wrong. It's not a glamorous problem. But it's real, slow, and it happens at thousands of small businesses every day. The deeper issue — one I've seen play out in many software projects — is that system rollouts do