PDF is de-facto standard for any invoicing, POs, quotes, etc.
If you solve the problem you can effectively programmatically deal with invoicing/payments/ large parts of ordering/dispensing. It's a no brainer to add it on to almost any financial/procurement software that deals with inter business stuff.
Any small-medium physical business can probably half their financial department if you can dependably solve this issue.
As far as I understand there are at least two standards (I know of in Germany): XRechnung and ZUGFeRD/Factur-X (which is PDF A/3 with embedded XML).
Small-mediums should be looking to consolidate buying through a few good suppliers and working with them directly to automate process, or adopting interchange formats.
Problem for some small-business is the cost (process changes, licencing etc) of adopting interchange formats and working with large vendors is prohibitive at their scale e.g. the airline BSP system.
I agree that solving the problem generally i.e. replacing an accounts payable staff person capable of processing arbitrary invoice documents will be comparable to self-driving in difficulty.
If a company deals with a lot of a single type of PDF, then the approach could be economical. I am actually involved in a project looking at doing this with AWS Textract.
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.
The proliferation of computers in business over the last 50 years is precisely because businesses can save money/expand capacity by adapting the business processes to the capabilities of the computers.
Over that time, computers have become more friendly to humans, but businesses have adapted and humans been trained to use what computers can do.
You can go further. Invoices often contain block sections of text with important terms of the invoice, such as shipping time information, insurance, warranties, etc. To build something that works universally, you also need very good natural language processing.
This should be obvious, but the answer is because OCR engines are not terribly accurate. If you have a native PDF, you're far better off parsing the PDF then converting to an image and OCRing. But if OCR ever becomes perfect, then sure.
While Abbyy is likely the best, it's also incredibly expensive. Roughly on the order of $0.01/page or maybe at best a tenth of that in high volume.
For comparison, I run a bunch of OCR servers using the open source tesseract library. The machine-time on one of the major cloud providers works out to roughly $0.01 for 100-1000 pages.