Seven years in EDI teaches you something most AI builders skip: the document is never the process.
An 850 is a purchase order. The process is the three phone calls, the spreadsheet, and the approval that happened before anyone sent it. An 856 is a ship notice. The process is the pack bench, the carrier pickup window, and the customer who changes the delivery address at 4 PM.
Agents that only read documents fail the same way bad EDI maps did. They handle the clean path and break on the first exception, because the exception was never in the document.
The fix is the same in both worlds. You learn the operation first. You build for the exceptions, not the happy path. You stay until it survives the dock.
This is why I am not worried about AI replacing EDI people. The people who understand the operation behind the document are the ones who will deploy the agents. The document readers were already replaceable.
The EDI people who learn agents will not be replaced by them. We will be the ones putting them to work.