AI Automates Expenses, But What Happens When AI Fails?

Organisations across the world rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ease the burden of manual processes that exist within our day to day lives. For finance teams, expense management and accounts payable are one of them. AI unlocks the ability to streamline repetitive expense processes including expense claims, approvals and credit card reimbursements, saving up to 90% of costs and time in most cases. Whilst it assists multiple departments, from sales teams on the ground to CFOs managing reporting, what happens when AI fails?

Should AI-driven expense and invoice management be considered by CFOs and Finance Leaders?

Gartner states that AI will “ultimately enable finance teams to automate and orchestrate multiple end-to-end processes to drive functional improvements”. Gartner also states that using technology to automate tedious finance processes reigns upon the top priorities for CFO and Finance Leaders to strategically sustain and boost long term ROI. This makes it almost inevitable for the modern finance team to enable technology to boost efficiencies within their expense management and accounts payable processes.

For example, staff using ProSpend can quickly snap a photo of their receipt. With OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, receipt data is uploaded and sent for approval. A complete cloud-based solution like ProSpend can also streamline the Supplier Invoice Process through processes such as Automatic Coding & Matching.

In a recent case study, Fuzzy Events reported an 85% time and cost-saving by automating manual AP processes through ProSpend.

Does AI fail and if so, what happens?

AI is designed to remove manual intervention required from administration teams to help best utilise their time and efforts on tasks that improve ROI. With unique tools offered by ProSpend including Bank Validation and Supplier Average, it offers benefits outside of cost and time savings including fraud mitigation.

Understanding how powerful Artificial Intelligence can be, it is also important to recognise that it is just like a human in the process of learning. It is always learning and adapting, but just like a human, it can and will make mistakes. Although once recognised, it aims to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Taking the example of OCR, what happens if invoices are not formatted correctly? This is where Automation Leaders, like ProSpend, invest in crucial services including HITL (Human-In-The-Loop) to resolve errors seamlessly.

HITL and how it helps expense management

Appen defines HITL as “a branch of artificial intelligence that leverages both human and machine intelligence to create machine learning models”. For organisations around the globe that are utilising technology for expense and invoice management, HITL offers peace of mind by resolving AI errors.

Leading software such as ProSpend, utilises expert teams that review each receipt and invoice that has been prompted as an error to assess why this occurred. This team will then train the AI system and apply a machine-learning algorithm to learn, adapt and understand what to do next time this error occurs.

It is evident that most businesses across the globe will look to automate their expense and accounts payable processes through AI. Understanding that it can and will fail, trusting a leading provider such as ProSpend allows businesses to experience features that offer peace of mind such as HITL. The HITL approach fuses machine learning and intelligence, with human intelligence to make fast, seamless and accurate decisions. This ensures that errors are not just eliminated, but prevents AI from making similar mistakes in the future.

Prospend is Australia’s leading Spend Management Platform, offering smart automation for finance teams. Through one cloud-based platform, easily manage expenses, invoices, purchase orders and travel spend. All with budget visibility. ProSpend is 100% Australian owned & developed and is loved by leading brands including KFC, WWF, Best & Less, Guide Dogs and Peoplebank. For those looking to better understand the benefits of automation, book your FREE savings consultation.