Finance and Accounting

AI, GenAI, and Agentic AI: The Final Frontier towards ‘Zero-Touch’ Accounts Payable?

The past decade can easily be construed as one of the pivotal moments in Finance and Accounting function with multiple new technologies making a foray every 2-3 years in waves, causing significant disruptions. The CFO’s office faced immense pressure to cut back-office operations costs while ensuring 100% compliance by adopting new technologies or relying on strategic offshore partners to bring all expertise, including services. Adopting transformative technology solutions across Finance functions then evolved from being significant to an absolute necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic; small yet significant case in point – that time witnessed an almost complete shift from paper invoices to digital PDF invoices even for highly change-resistant organisations, in order to ensure timely payments.

This blog explores the potential of the emerging technologies — AI, Generative AI, and Agentic AI accelerating the move towards autonomous AP operations.

Relevance of ‘Conventional’ Platforms and Point Solutions Thus Far

Varied technologies in vogue and in relevance during their times played their own important part in transforming Finance back-office operations especially in Accounts Payable due to its transactional nature. However, none of them could address the aspirational ‘zero-touch’ processing on a wide scale. RPA solutions are highly susceptible to system instabilities; conventional AP platforms are highly dependent on upstream data quality, limiting high throughput and invoicing business networks or Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) solutions usually run into change and onboarding challenges impeding widespread adoption.

These IT investments made by the CFO office will once again face significant disruption to comply with e-invoicing mandates rolling out globally in phases. Various countries will impose their own formats, regulations, and compliance requirements, adding layers of complexity that lead to new ways of working and financial reporting.

The New Era of Digital Transformation in AP: AI, GenAI, and Agentic AI

The advent of AI, GenAI (LLMs), and Agentic AI solutions in Finance & Accounting could not have been more opportune, given the myriads of internal and external complexities and challenges. These AI- and GenAI-based solutions have the capabilities to address the fundamental challenges that conventional platforms and point solutions lack, by providing

•  Intelligent data handling: The ability to ingest and process all types of data classes and categories — structured/unstructured, upstream/downstream, internal/external, historical/inflight data.
• Contextualised insights: The ability to mimic human decision-making and actions by leveraging LLMs, Machine Learning, and Neural Networks.
  

Though highly disruptive and innovative in nature, most of these new-era technologies will seamlessly converge with conventional platforms and systems of record, integrating essential sentient elements of sensing, learning, and decision making.

They have the potential to significantly shift the already prominent ‘Machine’ component in the existing ‘Man + Machine’ back-office operations synergy to a new paradigm of becoming completely dominant and autonomous.

Here are some real-world applications where AI and GenAI in play across the AP value chain, reducing human effort, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks :

• Knowledge graphs to proactively identify and provide remedial steps for blocked invoices in-flight even before an AP agent picks the invoice
• GenAI self-service solutions to address all queries without any manual intervention
• NLP technologies to fully automate vendor statement reconciliation
• OCR engines augmented with AI-based (facial-recognition-level) capabilities to eliminate manual training for invoice templates
• AI-based pervasive compliance solutions to automatically audit 100% of AP transactions, replacing manual partial sampling and manual quality audit
• GenAI reporting solutions to enable real-time and on-demand slicing, dicing, and analysis of data on user-friendly UIs, replacing static analytics dashboards.

Given the high interoperability and relevance of these technologies, it’s only a matter of time Moore’s Law comes into effect, ensuring its widespread adoption.

‘Navigate Your Next’ – Infosys BPM Accelerates Your Journey Towards Zero-Touch AP

Charting a blueprint to the new era of touchless AP requires more than just the latest technologies – it demands a forward-thinking partner to guide the change. At Infosys BPM, we empower clients to accelerate and achieve transformative growth by leveraging next-gen technologies, innovating, and delivering future-ready solutions that redefine industry standards and benchmarks and unlock new opportunities for success.

With our robust and unique blend of AI-based platforms like Infosys APOC and GenAI solutions, we design bespoke digital journeys for our customers perfectly aligned to their transformation roadmap, maturity level, and strategic goals.