// EDI's next chapter
Agentic EDI
Agentic EDI is AI that can set up trading partners, read their specs, transform data and create end-to-end EDI integrations. But how much of the work can the system actually do, and can you trust what it produces?
// bullshit detector
How to separate AI claims from reality
Every EDI vendor now claims to be AI-native. We need a way to identify the ones who've done it right from the ones who bolted on a chatbot.
Does it have context?
Can it see your configuration, meaning your connections, partners, transactions, logs, mappings, and implementation guides? Or is it answering in the abstract, from documentation it was trained on?
Does it have agency?
Can it do things, or only say things? A system with agency writes the mapping, creates the partner, and updates the connection. A system without it describes what should be done and leaves the work to you.
Is it trustworthy?
Is the work verifiably correct? An agent that acts without a way to check its output is worse than one that does nothing.
// the scale
The EDI autonomy scale
The EDI autonomy scale describes six levels to categorize the EDI capabilities of AI systems.
- Level 0 Manual
- No AI. A person reads the partner guides, hand-builds the mappings, configures transport, and handles every exception. Integrations take weeks to months and need expensive specialists.
- Level 1 Context-unaware advisor
- It answers questions, but it cannot see your configuration. Useful as a reference, blind to your situation.
- Level 2 Context-aware advisor
- It can see the state of your system but cannot act on it. This is where most products described as "guidance" or "support assistants" sit.
- Level 3 Acting under human approval
- It has context, it does the work, and its output is verifiable. A person approves before anything reaches a partner.
- Level 4 Autonomous within the domain
- Give it the implementation guides and test credentials and it builds working flows in both directions, escalating only when something is genuinely ambiguous.
- Level 5 Fully autonomous
- No human in the loop. This is a long way off.
// where we are
Where Tediware sits today
Tediware is a Level 3 system running in production, with multiple AI systems that have the context they need to diagnose and fix errors in your processing flows, ingest trading partner implementation guides and develop machine-readable versions of them, and create mappings automatically.
Verification is the key to our approach. When our AI assistant generates a mapping, it carefully delineates the things it is confident about and which it is not, highlighting the latter for human review. It also tests the mapping against the trading partner guide, so that the EDI you produce complies with your partner's expectations.
"The platform is genuinely easy to build against if you're writing your own software — we built our EDI integration in-house with Claude Code, straight against Tediware's API. We have complete visibility into the 'movements' of EDI documents. Hours and hours of tedious manual work have been eliminated."
// in the product
Some of the agentic EDI features in Tediware
We thoughtfully design our AI-powered features to prioritize human judgment.
Trading partner onboarding
The system reads the partner's implementation guide and builds the configuration.
Automated EDI mapping
The assistant drafts the transformations and a validation gate checks them before anything ships.
Error diagnosis
When errors happen, the assistant analyzes the data flow and tells you what broke and what to change.
// the full argument