Anyone who has asked three suppliers to quote for the same thing knows the frustration that follows. The quotes arrive in three different formats with three different structures. One is a single figure. One breaks the work into five items, two of which are described in a way that does not obviously correspond to anything in the others. One excludes something the others include, mentions it in a footnote, and offers it as an option. One quotes a day rate with an estimate of days; the others quote a fixed price. Comparing them properly means building a table by hand and working out, line by line, what each one actually covers - which is an hour of tedious work, so it frequently does not happen, and the decision gets made on the headline figure.
That headline figure is the least reliable part. The lowest quote is often low because it excludes something, assumes a best case, or prices the work optimistically and expects to raise variations later. The highest may include things the others will charge for separately, so that it ends up cheapest in practice. Without the table, none of this is visible, and the business chooses on a number that is not comparable to the other numbers. Worse, the exclusions surface after the work has started, when changing supplier is no longer an option and the price has stopped being a negotiation.
Normalising differently-shaped documents into a common structure is precisely the sort of task current AI tools do well, and it is a good fit because the judgement involved is recognition rather than expertise. Give it the three quotes and ask for a table with one row per item of work and one column per supplier, marking clearly where a supplier has not mentioned something at all. The blank cells are the point of the exercise: what nobody quoted for, what only one supplier thought to include, and where the same words might mean two different amounts of work. That is the picture that takes an hour to build by hand and that most small businesses therefore never build.
Two things stay with the person. First, verify the figures against the original documents before deciding, because a misread number in a comparison table is a genuinely expensive error and it will look entirely plausible sitting in a tidy row. Second, the blanks are questions rather than conclusions: go back to the supplier and ask whether the missing item is excluded or simply unstated, because it is often the latter and the answer is free. What the tool has done is get you to the right questions in five minutes instead of an hour, and the right questions are the whole of the benefit.