Ardent Partners launched a special “AI in Action” interview series. The “AI in Action” series represents an opportunity for their Chief Research Officer, Andrew Bartolini to sit down with senior executives of solution providers that are focused on AI now and in the near-term and use these discussions as an opportunity to share the company’s focus on, expertise in, and vision for AI within the AP industry.
Our CEO, John Wallace was interviewed back in October and you can read the full transcript here. We have summarised the key points below.
Where are the biggest opportunities for AI to improve accounts payable and B2B payment efficiencies and productivity?
AI is the key to rapid, accurate, and touchless capture of invoice data — our AI-based processes achieve fantastic read rates which are further improved by machine learning over time resulting in 100% capture rates
AI-powered invoice matching and pairing takes the touchless concept to the next level saving thousands of man hours whilst improving accuracy.
Straight-through, touchless processing is great, but only if the invoices are genuine. With the continuing rise in invoice- and payment-based fraud, AI has a crucial role in protecting the organisation by detecting fraud before it happens — and using machine learning to drive out false negatives.
How do you view your customers’ (and prospective customers’) AI attitudes?
AI provides the power to reduce costs and to allow finance teams to focus on more profitable work, customers are overwhelmingly in favour of AI. This is a positive driver for AI. But there is a caveat — savvy customers know that AI is not flawless. Customers want the security of knowing what AI is doing and that they can override where needed.
Put another way, on one side, many customers are looking for the magic bullet and think AI will automate all their processes, and on the flip side, there are the customers who are nervous about touchless processes and want the “human” element of control.
What are the leading AI subsets (e.g., machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning, etc.) with the biggest impact on accounts payable/B2B payment solutions? And why?
Subsets of AI widely used in AP and payments to achieve touchless processing include, natural language processing, statistical pattern recognition, and neural networks such as deep convolutional neural networks.
Expert systems are AI systems designed to mimic human decision-making by applying rules and knowledge-based inference.
In state-of-the-art systems, software robotics play a fundamental part in virtually every process, replacing human effort and gaining faster and more accurate results.
Fuzzy logic comes into play in many areas, including for finding documents, identifying the correct GL codes to use, directing queries to the correct recipients, or providing automated responses to suppliers.
How are you ensuring the accuracy and reliability of customers’ AI models (AI data output)?
AI is a brilliant attribute for our systems, but an attribute that must be controlled, supervised, and continuously improved. The first key is to provide comprehensive business intelligence and analytics to identify where AI is succeeding and where it can be improved
How do you plan to support your AP clients if/when an AI skills gap exists?
AI is continuously evolving, and our product roadmap reflects this evolution through constant research and evaluation of new techniques and technologies so that where there is genuine benefit to finance teams, enhancements can be incorporated and made available to customers.
Where do you see AI going within the AP automation market over the next five years?
Some aspects of AI already incorporated into processes, such as data capture, are relatively mature. The goal will be to take advantage of incremental improvements and consequent performance gains.
Read more in the full interview here or get in touch and find out how we can can help with our solutions with embedded Ai ready to automate your P2P processes.
