The End of EDI Mapping: How Orderful's AI-Powered Mosaic Is Disrupting Traditional Integration and Accelerating TMS Deployments in 2025

Companies with hundreds of trading partners typically spend months building between 400 and 500 individual EDI maps, each one a painstaking exercise in translating data formats between systems. Companies across supply chains still devote months, sometimes years, to building mapping logic, maintaining brittle connections, and troubleshooting cryptic document failures. That reality just changed with Orderful's December 15, 2025 launch of Mosaic, the industry's first AI-powered EDI integration product that eliminates mapping entirely.

The Traditional EDI Mapping Crisis That's Costing Companies Millions

EDI mapping has become one of the most expensive bottlenecks in supply chain operations. When companies need to connect with a new trading partner, they face a predictable nightmare: the mapping process that translates data from your ERP, Accounting, or another business system into the EDI document that is sent can take weeks or even months per partner.

The financial impact is staggering. Hard EDI costs, also known as direct costs, which have an immediate impact to your bottom line, can come in the form of compliance charges if the problem you're having means your outbound documents aren't meeting your trading partners' requirements. These charges, often charged per document, can add up quickly if the problem is a systemic one that isn't caught.

Beyond direct costs, there's an even more insidious problem: soft costs. Soft EDI costs, which are also known as indirect costs, are those that you don't see on your monthly expense reports, but chew up your resources, distracting them from contributing to your business growth. These costs result from problems that take employee time to identify, work around, and/or resolve. These types of EDI problems aren't just an inconvenience – they also impact your business's earning potential immensely.

Traditional EDI providers like SPS Commerce, TrueCommerce, and IBM Sterling have built their entire business models around managing this complexity. While this management model may be a great fit for some businesses, others find relying on a vendor for onboarding and configuration to be restrictive. Users cannot edit how mapping works on the back end, making them reliant on the vendor for implementation and slowing down the onboarding process.

Orderful's Mosaic Breakthrough: The First Zero-Mapping EDI Solution

Instead of requiring companies to build and maintain maps for each trading partner, Mosaic relies on AI to interpret, adapt, and transform data. The technology represents a fundamental shift from decades of manual mapping approaches to intelligent automation. Mosaic learns from Orderful's network of over 10,000 trading partners, absorbing decades of partner rules, document behaviors, and edge cases that a single company could catalog on its own.

What makes this different from AI rule suggestion tools that simply speed up mapping creation? Mosaic is the first EDI solution that eliminates mapping entirely. Our AI automatically transforms your data to any partner's format - no manual mapping, no transformations, no headaches. Mosaic automatically translates between modern JSON and legacy EDI formats, so you never touch X12 or EDIFACT directly. What used to require specialized consultants and months of implementation now works out of the box.

The implementation experience transforms completely. Most teams connect their first trading partner within days. The AI handles all mapping automatically, so you avoid the weeks of manual configuration required by traditional EDI.

Technical Architecture: How AI Replaces Decades of Manual Mapping Logic

Mosaic's architecture differs fundamentally from traditional EDI platforms. Mosaic redefines this foundation with plain-language JSON, automated partner intelligence, and real-time validation, enabling teams to build integrations using the same patterns they use with modern SaaS APIs. If your team can integrate with Stripe or Twilio, they can integrate with Mosaic. No EDI expertise required.

The AI continuously adapts to partner requirements without manual intervention. Mosaic's AI learns each partner's specific requirements and automatically adjusts your data to match their format. Partner updates? We handle those too. From there, Mosaic handles everything, including understanding partner requirements, shaping payloads to meet those rules, and instantly validating changes.

Impact on TMS Implementations and Supply Chain Operations

Transport management systems have historically struggled with EDI integration complexity. Carrier connectivity requires dozens of different mapping configurations, each one consuming weeks of development time. With Mosaic's approach, what used to be a years-long problem with a single integration that can be completed in weeks becomes possible.

This affects TMS vendors across the spectrum. Traditional players like MercuryGate and Descartes have built extensive professional services teams around EDI mapping challenges. Modern solutions like Cargoson are positioned to benefit from reduced integration complexity, allowing faster deployment cycles and lower total cost of ownership.

The impact extends beyond initial implementation to ongoing operations. Add new trading partners in minutes as our AI instantly learns their format and runs validated test transactions. Connect once and immediately access thousands of trading partners with transaction testing, compliance, and error resolution handled automatically. For logistics operations managing hundreds of carriers, this represents a fundamental change in scaling capabilities.

Industry Disruption: What This Means for Traditional EDI Providers

Orderful's Mosaic launch puts pressure on the entire EDI vendor landscape. Andreessen Horowitz general partner and Orderful board member Brian Roberts called Mosaic a rare shift in supply chain technology. "During my years at Walmart, I saw how critical reliable, scalable EDI infrastructure is to the supply chain, and Mosaic represents exactly the type of innovation the industry has been missing".

SPS Commerce, TrueCommerce, and IBM Sterling now face a competitor that promises to eliminate their core value proposition: mapping expertise. These vendors have built massive consulting organizations around the complexity Mosaic claims to automate away. How they respond will determine their relevance over the next few years.

The shift also creates opportunities for modern integration platforms. Companies like Cargoson in transport execution, along with other API-first solutions, can potentially integrate with Mosaic to offer customers simplified EDI connectivity without the traditional mapping overhead.

Cloud-based EDI adoption becomes more attractive when complexity barriers disappear. Cloud-based alternatives have gradually replaced on-premises solutions. 70% of businesses now rely on cloud-based business apps, forecast to rise to 85% by 2025.

Implementation Considerations and Strategic Implications for 2025

Despite Mosaic's promise, supply chain professionals should approach vendor evaluation systematically. Most migrations complete in 2-4 weeks. Existing integrations remain fully supported. Mosaic is an enhancement, not a replacement for current connections.

When evaluating AI-powered EDI solutions, consider hybrid approaches. Traditional providers still have advantages in certain scenarios, particularly around complex compliance requirements or highly customized partner relationships. Companies like Cargoson offer another perspective, focusing on transport-specific workflow optimization that complements rather than replaces EDI capabilities.

Budget for the transition period. The Integrated package starts at $1,999/month. This includes the API for EDI to build integration with any system. The Enterprise plan requires a custom quote. Compare these costs against your current mapping development expenses and ongoing maintenance overhead.

Test thoroughly before committing. At launch, Mosaic supports the full Order-to-Cash journey, handling everything from initial orders through acknowledgments, shipments, and invoicing. Verify that your specific document types and partner requirements fall within current capabilities.

The Future of EDI: From Mapping Management to Intelligent Automation

Mosaic represents the beginning of AI-driven EDI automation, not the end point. At Orderful, we're proud to be the first EDI platform to meaningfully integrate AI. This isn't about following trends—it's about continuing to innovate and simplify EDI workflows for our customers. By combining artificial intelligence with the collective knowledge of our vast network, we're not just solving today's EDI challenges.

The industry is moving toward autonomous data exchange. As we see artificial intelligence continuing to break into nearly every sector of business, there is no doubt artificial intelligence (AI) can and will be integrated with electronic data interchange (EDI) to enhance B2B processes. AI can help to automate and streamline EDI-based processes in several ways, including: Automating data entry and conversion: AI can be used to automate the entry and conversion of EDI data into different formats.

Expect other vendors to respond with their own AI initiatives. The question becomes whether they can match Orderful's network effects advantage: Mosaic learns from Orderful's network of over 10,000 trading partners. Building comparable AI capabilities without an existing partner network creates a significant competitive challenge.

For supply chain professionals, this creates both opportunity and urgency. Companies that embrace AI-powered EDI automation early gain competitive advantages in partner onboarding speed and operational costs. Those that delay face increasing pressure from partners expecting faster, simpler integration processes.

The mapping problem that has plagued EDI for decades may finally have a solution. Whether Mosaic delivers on its promises remains to be proven at scale, but the approach represents exactly the kind of breakthrough the industry has needed. Smart supply chain teams will be watching closely.