This is compared to inadequate application of humans. it is not competing with people who know how to do regex and string parsing. It is for the people who put an office assistant to the task. It is better to inadequately apply AI here as opposed to inadequately apply a human who probably has more fun things to do.

What about subtle formatting differences (Country, Territory, Postal code is the norm. Doesn't have to be.). What if we applied this to hand written addresses? (Adding an OCR component).

I'm sure the USPS is already doing this and more, and if not, there's probably some AI jobs lined up for it :)