> A business that invests in building a machine that reads data, produced by a 3rd party machine, using format intended for lay humans to read, is not investing

> A business that invests in building a machine that reads data, produced by a 3rd party machine, using format intended for lay humans to read, is not investing in the right tech IMO. Building machines that understand formats that are understood by humans is exactly what we should be doing. People should read, write, and process information in a format that is comfortable and optimized to them. Machines should bend to us, we should not bend to them. If businesses only dealt with machine readable formats, everyone's computer would still be using the command line. And there's real condescension in your post: > Small-mediums should be looking to consolidate buying through a few good suppliers and working with them directly to automate process You're saying that businesses need to change their business to accommodate data formats, but it should be the other way around.