Aug 23, 2025
Carlos Faria
Strategist
Supply Chain
EDI automated the documents that were already digital. AI is automating the rest: the PDFs, scans and emailed orders that still get retyped. Here is what that looks like on a network moving more than a million documents a month.
Most of what AI will change in supply chains is not glamorous. It is the invoice that arrives as a PDF, the order that arrives as a photo of a handwritten page, and the person who retypes both into an ERP. That work has survived thirty years of supply chain technology. AI is the first technology that can reliably take it away.
Electronic data interchange did its job. Between large retailers and their established suppliers, purchase orders, delivery notes and invoices have travelled as structured data for decades. On the M2North network alone, more than a million documents a month move that way.
But EDI only works when both sides are digital. Every buyer has a long tail of smaller suppliers who invoice by email, send scanned PDFs, or still post paper. Every distributor has customers who order by WhatsApp, by email, or by sending a photo of a list. None of that fits an EDI connection, so it lands on someone's desk to be keyed in by hand.
That long tail is where the cost is: in errors, in disputes, in late payment and in the people tied up keying in documents instead of solving problems.
AI document capture reads the documents EDI cannot. An invoice arrives as a PDF. The AI extracts the supplier, the line items, the quantities and the totals. It matches them against the purchase order and the goods received note, flags what does not match, and posts what does, without anyone retyping it.
The same applies in the other direction. A sales order that arrives by email can be read, checked for invalid items, pricing mismatches and stock-outs, and land in the ERP as a clean sales order, with only the exceptions sent to a person.
The important shift is that the supplier or customer does not have to change anything. They keep sending what they send today. The automation happens on the receiving side.
These are our own figures, from our own network:
The second result matters more than the first. Automation rates can be raised by focusing on a few large suppliers. Growing the number of suppliers who trade digitally means the long tail moved, which is exactly where EDI never reached.
Start where the volume is and the risk is low. Supplier invoices against purchase orders are usually the best first step: high volume, clear rules, and a three-way match that tells you immediately whether the AI got it right.
Measure straight-through processing, not just accuracy. Accuracy says how well a document was read. Straight-through processing says how many documents went from inbox to ERP without anyone touching them. The second is the one that frees up people.
Keep people for the exceptions. Good automation does not remove people from the process. It sends them only the documents that need judgement: the price that does not match, the delivery that was short, the supplier who changed their bank details.
Ask for a commitment. If a provider believes in its automation, it should be willing to put a number on it. On our Missing Link Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable products, we guarantee to process at least 70% of your received transactions, or we don't charge you for the month, subject to our standard terms.
The next stage is not a smarter AI reading documents in isolation. It is AI working inside a trading network, where every document it reads can be checked against the order, the delivery and the supplier's verified identity on the same network. That is when automation stops being a back-office efficiency and becomes a way of knowing who you are trading with.
See how Missing Link handles accounts payable, or talk to us about where AI would make the biggest difference in your business.
Aug 7, 2026
Ivan Jenkins
Co-Founder
Case Study
A national building-materials retailer lifted accounts payable automation from a 55% baseline to 75%, and now processes 33,000 transactions a month through AI.
Sep 10, 2026
Brett Misselhorn
General Manager
Newsletter
The Trust Update for August 2026: an NPS of 9.0 from 268 independent client reviews, 1,222,731 documents exchanged across the network, 39,300 pages processed by our AI at 95%+ extraction accuracy, ISO 27001 certification and a CyberVadis Silver medal.
May 25, 2026
Carlos Faria
Strategist
Supply Chain
Real progress rarely comes from ideology alone. It comes from understanding systems — and from optimising the relationships between them.
See how M2North turns these ideas into practical workflows.