AI involvement in architecting electronic business documents

 This is armchair speculation, but if AI starts designing electronic invoice variant schemas, such as extension schemas for UBL or PEPPOL, it might end the usefulness of electronic invoicing for VAT or sales tax revenues. It makes sense to find ways to accommodate what seems the inevitable rise of AI generated XML schemas, such as those for standard XML electronic invoices. The core schemas could be human-maintained, human-governed, while keeping track of changing requirements of invoicing, or industry, or national and regional variations, this might be put into the ‘hands’ of AI. The AI could be taught the constraints of keeping the core intact and rarely or never changed, while it is ‘allowed’ (or in future it ‘allows’ itself) to produce extensions to this core to cater for inevitable variations beyond the core. It is easy enough for humans to understand this, and therefore for humans to know how to maintain the overall governance of this kind of architecture, and maintain the core itself, including its ongoing standardisation. I suggest the main weakness is the distrust humans have in AI. The invoice itself is primarily a document for maintaining human scrutiny of business transactions, including prominently the collecting of taxes on these transactions. Humans must trust the overall business and public service revenue collection involved in the use of invoices. If it becomes the norm to treat AI like humans have treated innovations such as genetically modified, or pesticide-treated crops, where ‘GMO-free’ or ‘organic’ labelling is something many consumers will pay extra to see on products and services, and thus ‘AI-free’ gains traction, it might become politically and economically impossible to persist AI involvement in invoicing, including in its architecture and extension provision, without providing AI-free options. How far these options will go in ensuring AI is out of the loop remains to be seen. Will it mean any involvement of AI, even in deciding the architecture, destroys public trust? That could become an increasingly costly challenge.