Are You Ready for GenAI to Automate Accounts Payable Processes?

AP automation solutions, powered by AI, have enormous potential to rescue accounting teams from manual work. This is why over the past decade, accounts payable (AP) teams have led the charge within finance to take advantage of RPA, AI and ML technologies to automate the tedious manual tasks associated with processing supplier invoices. The early adoption of AI technology to automate accounts payable processes helped it achieve extremely high invoice auto-posting rates, faster invoice approvals, and process large volumes of invoices quickly and accurately. The positive return on investment AP realized from automation quickly paved the way for other areas of finance to adopt AI-enabled processes as well.  

The Enormous Potential for Generative AI in Finance

Today, the Generative AI (GenAI) revolution opens up a whole new world of possibilities for process automation in finance. However, according to findings from the 2023 Gartner AI in Finance Survey, less than 10% of organizations are using AI in production in their finance function or scaling AI usage in finance to larger groups of users. This puts finance two times behind in the adoption of AI compared with organizations’ administrative support functions (Gartner 2023). This lag is remarkable when you consider the potential for savings with GenAI in Finance. According to Boston Consulting Group, applying Gen AI in payments has an overall potential improvement in gross productivity of approximately 20% to 30%.  

But what makes GenAI such a game-changer for Finance? Unlike first generation AI tools, which were logical and rule based, GenAI is capable of deep and dynamic learning that mimics human intelligence. GenAI is able to learn and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks which will help expand the power of AI-powered automation into complex financial processing tasks that require adaptability and human-like “fuzzy logic”.

Why AP Automation is Perfectly Poised to be an Early Adopter of GenAI in Finance  

In AP, GenAI can be applied to a selection of hard to automate tasks that according to recent research by Ardent Partners can take up to 25% of an AP analysts’ time. Tasks such as exception handling or vendor communications can be significantly sped up and streamlined by applying the advanced capabilities available with GenAI, including natural language understanding, continuous and transferrable learning, and creative generation of content. 

As a leading global innovator in financial automation software, Serrala is embracing the power of GenAI in finance and rolling it into our solutions to automate accounts payable processes. Serrala recently announced that Alevate AP, a cloud-native solution for AP automation will be the first of its solutions to incorporate these cutting-edge GenAI capabilities. 

 In this first release Alevate AP will employe GenAI to automate tasks such as:
 

• Streamlining supplier communications : Use conversational chat to update suppliers on the status of their submitted invoices and pending payments.
• Identifying discounts at risk, Identify invoices with the largest available discount by date to prioritize processing
• Automating Invoice coding : Suggest GL account, cost center, department and approver for Non-PO invoices based on historical invoice processing patterns

More GenAI capabilities will be added to Alevate AP with future releases.

Taking the First Steps Toward Becoming a GenAI Fueled Finance Organization 

As more finance organizations modernize and move off of legacy on-premise systems to highly scalable cloud-based systems, the potential for GenAI to transform financial processing will continue to grow. However, the Gartner research shows that finance needs to become comfortable using these technologies and adopt AI at a much faster pace if they want to stay aligned with other areas of the business. Inevitably, there will be some process changes required to fully leverage the power of AI, but finance can demonstrate the value of the technology by building out appropriate uses cases for the technology across AP, AR, FP&A and other areas. This is good news for AP, which is already more digitized than other areas of finance. By adopting AI-powered solutions such as Alevate AP, AP teams will be in an ideal position to take the lead on incorporating GenAI into their processes to automate the most time-consuming tasks and add immense value to the business.

To learn more about Serrala Alevate Accounts Payable, download our brochure or contact us.