🧠 Business Card Scanner – Automate Contact Extraction This workflow automates the process of extracting contact details from business cards (PDF or image) and saving them directly into an n8n Data Table . No more manual data entry — just upload a card and let AI do the rest. ⚙️ How It Works Upload the business card via a web form (PDF or image). The uploaded file is converted to Base64 for processing. The Base64 data is sent to the Mistral OCR API , which extracts text from the image. The OCR output is parsed into JSON. An AI Agent (OpenAI GPT-4o-mini) interprets the extracted text and converts it into structured business card information (e.g., name, company, email, phone). The Structured Output Parser validates and aligns the data with a predefined schema. The workflow upserts (inserts or updates) the contact details into an n8n Data Table named business cards , using the email address as the unique identifier. ✅ Result: Seamless digitization of business cards into structured, searchable contact data. 🧩 Prerequisites Before importing the workflow, make sure you have the following: n8n Instance with access to the Data Table feature OpenAI Platform account and API key (configured in n8n) Mistral AI account and API key (configured in n8n) 🛠️ Setup Steps Import the Workflow Download and import the JSON file into your n8n instance. Create a Data Table Name it business_cards (or adjust the workflow accordingly). Add the following fields: firstname
name
company
jobdescription
phone
mobil
email
street
postcode
place
web Configure API Credentials Mistral OCR API → Add your API key under HTTP Bearer Auth . OpenAI API → Add your API key under OpenAI Credentials . Model: gpt-4o-mini (recommended for speed and low cost). Activate the Web Form Trigger Enable the trigger node to make the business card upload form accessible via a public URL. Test the Workflow Upload a sample business card. Confirm that extracted contact data automatically appears in your Data Table. 💡 Example JSON Output {
"firstname": "Anna",
"name": "Müller",
"company": "NextGen Tech GmbH",
"jobdescription": "Head of Marketing",
"email": " [email protected] ",
"phone": "+49 821 1234567",
"mobil": "+49 170 9876543",
"street": "Schillerstraße 12",
"postcode": "86150",
"place": "Augsburg",
"web": "https://nextgen.tech"
}