Autonomous AP
AI takes your work from boring to brilliant.
Our finance AI learns your business's most complex processes to make decisions like an experienced finance professional. It takes away the tedium so you can focus on what's most important.
The impact of AI on your finance operations
Rule-based automation, machine learning (ML), and OCR are not the same as artificial intelligence, or AI. While they may be effective for certain tasks and play an important part in your day-to-day operations, they rely on preprogrammed rules and lack AI’s versatility and adaptability. Ultimately, you’re left with an overwhelming amount of manual work, leading to shortcuts, errors, and increased costs.
With AI, you no longer have to:
- Read documents, categorize expenses, or reconcile accounts
- Manually process supplier invoices and payments
- Monitor, discover, or prevent fraud
Manual work
Lacks any form of Al, relying entirely on your finance team
Rules-based and ML automation
Some automation but still requires feedback from your finance team
Autonomous Al
Tasks are completed and decisions are made with little or no human assistance
Take your team to the next level
Leverage AI to boost productivity, reduce costs, and enhance overall performance
Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, AppZen provides your finance team with a virtual expert that continuously learns and adapts to your organization's unique needs. Our AI-driven solutions automate repetitive tasks, enhance decision-making, and uncover valuable insights, allowing your finance team to focus on strategic initiatives and drive business growth. It's like having an additional team member with years of experience, who never gets tired, takes a vacation, or calls in sick, tirelessly working behind the scenes to ensure your finance operations run smoothly and efficiently.
Not every automation is the same. Rules-based and machine learning automation systems can go only so far. Take a look at how Autonomous AI compares to manual work or rules-based and ML automation. Only autonomous AI can provide the boost in productivity, accuracy, and efficiency of an experienced team member.
Spend review and audit
Closely monitoring transactions to ensure compliance and control spend is a key responsibility of finance teams. Worse than your organization losing money is the development of an abusive spend culture that leads to waste and fraud.
Manual work
Perform random audits, typically on 10% of T&E reports and spend transactions, hoping to find waste, fraud, and compliance violations
- The remaining 90% of spend goes unreviewed
- Enforcement of compliant spend behavior is inconsistent and challenging
Rules-based and ML automation
Program spend limit rules to trigger out-of-policy violations and use machine learning’s predictive analytics to find anomalies
- New policies require time-consuming reprogramming
- Even advanced analytics can’t understand spend reasoning, limiting real, actionable insights
Autonomous Al
AI reads and understands receipts, invoices, and card transactions like a human, to accurately audit 100% of your spend for you
- Trains to learn your company’s specific policies and risk profiles
- Enforces compliance and automates actions on every transaction
Finance document understanding
Manually reading every transaction or invoice cannot scale efficiently. Changes to supplier invoice formats, item and service descriptions, and new vendor staff erode your automation system’s value and result in increases in manual processing over time.
Manual work
Manually read transaction lines and match them to purchases, one-by-one
- Inefficient, costly, and error-prone
- Large staff required to scale; outsourcing results in a loss of control, higher costs, and backlog
Rules-based and ML automation
Extract data based on template fields. New formats, locations, and staff result in more manual work
- OCR that is 90% confident can’t tell which 10% is incorrect; you have to review all extracted data
- Template maintenance is needed when operations change
Autonomous Al
AI accurately reads and understands all document information for you, in any format, in numerous languages
- No templates needed
- 100% confident in its data reading so there’s no need for your review
- Scales indefinitely without adding headcount
Institutional knowledge retention
Headcount changes can result in the loss of important finance operations know-how, such as how to assign correct GL accounts or cost centers, or how to match purchase orders to invoices. Training new team members takes time and critical resources.
Manual work
Only experienced employees can make accurate decisions, requiring constant training to avoid errors
- Employee retention is critical so institutional knowledge is not lost when an employee leaves
- Constant training on new operating procedures is required to avoid errors
Rules-based and ML automation
Only perform simple, repetitive tasks, leading to low-confidence predictions that need human review and action every time
- Decisions require more context and human help
- Finance and IT teams must make continuous changes to rules and templates
Autonomous Al
AI learns from your review process to make accurate, contextual decisions without assistance
- 100% of your institutional knowledge of processes, policies, and formats is retained
- Decisions are confident with no additional human review needed
Adapting to change
Change is constant in business, requiring training and time to adjust. Traditional automation can’t make intelligent changes as your business evolves, requiring ongoing and expensive IT maintenance.
Manual work
Team members require time to individually learn new document formats, policies, and procedures
- New employees need lengthy training to learn processes and policies
- Small teams can’t adapt as business grows; delays and requests for headcount increase
Rules-based and ML automation
Finance and IT teams work together to make continuous changes to rules, templates, business policies, etc.
- Requires extensive software and process management to keep up with constant changes
- Changes happen often, leading to increased expense and delay
Autonomous Al
AI’s feedback loop learns from you during transaction processing and constantly adapts its predictions
- AI only needs your feedback 2-3 times to learn changes to data entry, policy, PO matching, or accounting processes
- The system grows increasingly more accurate over time
Ready to put our finance AI to work for you?
90%
ACHIEVE UP TO 90% AUTO-APPROVAL OF EXPENSES
5%
SAVE UP TO 5% IN ANNUAL T&E SPEND
< 15 min
TO PROCESS INVOICES WITH NO HUMAN VALIDATION
100%
ACCURATE ENTRY AND ACCOUNTING OF INVOICES
Platform brief: Autonomous spend-to-pay processing
Here’s how our AI-driven autonomous spend-to-pay platform touchlessly controls enterprise spend to reduce risk, cost, and payment friction.
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Guide to Autonomous AP
Finance automation can’t fix the problems inherent to traditional AP processes. Discover the strategic benefits of autonomous solutions and 7 requirements for deployment success.
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Why Georgetown’s AP team adopted an AI solution that loves to learn
Georgetown University’s 9-person AP team needed an invoice processing solution that could adapt to t...
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