A platform team is writing a shell script that runs on a scheduled Compute Engine VM to inventory all VM instances across several projects. The script must extract specific fields (instance name, zone, and machine type) from the gcloud command output and feed them into a downstream tool that only accepts structured input it can parse reliably. The team currently parses the default human-readable table output using tools like grep and awk, but the script breaks whenever gcloud changes column spacing or adds columns. As the architect, what should you advise them to do to make the parsing robust?