Collaborate on Automated Invoices for Organizations with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Automated invoices for organizations

invoice automation is a huge topic in the ap and p2p community in 2022 and will be for the next few years in this very special ceo session we're going to talk about invoice automation innovation misconceptions about invoice automation and the ability to read email in an invoice automation model make sure you stick around until the end when our experts share tips for a successful automation project and maybe we could start with an ant um perhaps you could tell us what you see as the biggest innovation in the last few years impacting invoice automation yes of course uh uh thanks mary if i go back to the innovation that is happening um what comes to mind obviously is artificial intelligence and i say that it's not just with invoice automation it has it is revolutionizing the entire business landscape entire things how we do work how we drive cars um how we buy things and invoice automation has been impacted uh exactly the same way like every other industry has been with artificial intelligence and i feel uh there is also a lot of misconception around artificial intelligence because people haven't seen it though they have used it in different areas of how they buy things how they use things but when i come to invoice automation and i look at artificial intelligence uh we have been bombarded with a lot of ai as companies call it in their applications in the invoice automation applications that are out there legacy applications that have been around for decades now suddenly call themselves ai and it has for that reason provided a different or a misconception to users on what ai really means ai doesn't mean that you get new set of fancy charts predictions uh which could be right which could be wrong that's not ai ai is when a machine can do a job as good or better than a human right so that's about ai and when you have ai doing actually the job very much better than any person can uh that is true ai and that invoice impacts your how you process your invoices how you can process your invoices automatically you're talking about real invoice automation that is ground up using ai i was kind of laughing when i was listening to you talk because i think one of the first applications that i was aware of with ai was on amazon and the recommendation system that they use after you purchase something and how i laugh when i see some of the recommendations that they commit it's not perfect yeah so so most of the ais has been invented in the consumer space it's all about making you buy the stuff that you probably don't need but you would love to buy right or um spend more time on applications or spend more time watching netflix because there's a great recommendation engine out there which tells you hey this is other shows that you could you could actually watch so the technology has its roots the real ai technology has its roots in in consumer applications because that's where the most money should be made i guess right but as it has found its way into enterprise and into how finance applications work but when it comes to finance and enterprise it's all about getting the real deal are you saving money are you making me compliant are you making more efficient can i do things faster so unless ai can produce all that stuff it is not real ai so ai has moved from their consumer space the technology that was invented out there and technology is very clear it's about giving machines eyes so we call it computer vision it's about giving machines the ability to speak or understand language we call it nlp natural language processing and we the the behaviors and the understanding we call it machine learning right to understand based on the data and get the expertise of that domain right so these are like basic building blocks of ai but applying it to um invoice automation so that they produce the outcomes that finance and ap teams really care about is the critical part which is where i think the innovation has really happened all right jamie not to put any pressure on but can you top that look i mean what's lovely is you know i think hearing from an expert somebody that's been there done it and obviously he's in that industry you know you and i are you and i mary we we work with the users we work with the community so we know what the reality is you know of these systems and what users use so what i done started with was really that many many organizations you know sort of maybe miscommunicate what ai is all about and i think the issue there is that users get then brought into self um you know they don't quite understand and they might be buying product or solutions that aren't really sufficient or fit for purpose so that's the first challenge but again you know if i look from the community point of view in terms of the last couple of years which i think was the question mary's which you know innovation the last few years which has impacted invoice and automation i think it's user adoption to be honest i think um that the fear of going down that route of invoice automation he's starting to to lesser because we've gone through this working from home and different you know different environments i think people for the first time are really seeing the real value and that's from c suite level right through to user user level so i think there's more of a user adoption i think people are excited about the product but i do agree with alan's point that you've really got to look at the products you've got to look at the solutions you're going to look at what what what's right for an organization it isn't a one one size fits all for everybody it might not be ai it might be invoice automation or you know rpa there might be lots of different solutions that might be relevant for organizations but it must be sold in the right way by the right type of organization and you know one of the things we don't hear anymore which i think is a good thing you know when we first started talking about this people especially when we were talking about bots it was like people thought there was going to be a robot sitting in the cubicle next to them and i think we've gotten past that so i'm using that kind of segue into talking a little bit about which we've already done um some of the biggest misconceptions and and i'm pleased to say i think anyway that we've gotten away from thinking at least that there would be robots in the office of course when we're talking about robots in the office it's when we were all in the office and now we're not there so you want to talk a little bit more about uh misconceptions and yeah definitely i just want to kind of figure back on what jamie just said about what happened in the last two years uh one of the things that i used to see with customers and talking to cfos ap managers uh they're always under pressure to reduce cost and make it efficient and one easy way out was to outsource it let somebody else do it let somebody else let's take care of the labor arbitrage and get get things out there that entire process has been disrupted and what i mean by that is and during the pandemic when everybody was working from home there were huge delays in processing um invoices right processing any kind of transactions that were outsourced people couldn't come to work there were disruptions and um as jamie alluded to that led to a massive digital transformation initiatives from companies companies wanted to automate those functions so you you converted from paper to cloud applications how can i get out of my desktop scanner and ask my suppliers to send invoices in all those things happened but but but really the true transformation was i thought was when um some of the cfos started thinking about hey is this the since you are doing this transformation since you're moving from one system to another right is this an opportunity to really re-look at what this process could mean is it is the same thing from going from one rule-based system a desktop system that we had to a cloud-based system yeah it's going to be better we are going to be not connected to the same desktop we can work from anywhere but is it the right thing to do right now or should i take care of uh of the technology that is out there and and try to do something different which will make me make this process future proof for the next couple of years right and that that actually led to this massive investment that i saw and massive number of companies that i saw using ai and uh i was at a conference um last week um the got the cfo conference uh garthner as you know is a big name in um telling cfos about the trends industry about the trends and what's happening right and what i saw them talking about is hey cfos they had probably a couple of hundred if not a thousand cfos in the in the in the room right the take the next step on using ai to get to autonomous now i had not seen a lot of um you know uh analysts or consultants talking about autonomous right and i'll get to that how autonomous um is different and what does it mean but really it is grounded in ai grounded in next set of transformation where you want to make sure that you are leapfrogging not going from an incremental gain in your invoice automation system uh but leapfrogging into something that is really differentiate you and set you up for being competitive in the next decade or so so maybe i i went to a tangent a little bit on uh jimmy's question but i thought it was important that your your your folks would it makes it a little bit more interesting these were just some kind of some rough guidelines okay jamie do you have anything to add to that yeah i mean again you know it's some excellent points and it's lovely to hear somebody who's an industry expert but again if you're looking at the biggest misconceptions um that we encounter i think it's both sides mary i think there's a misconception from a user point of view that the the adoption or how the the system will be used could be too difficult so the misconception there is oh well you know it's uh maybe we don't want change we'll push back a little bit and um it's going to be far too difficult to train et cetera et cetera and that's a misconception because actually a lot of these solutions aren't as difficult as people make out that's number one and then from it from a sales perspective from a solutions perspective it's it's what i mentioned earlier it's about um what they're selling and what the what the desire need is from the organization sometimes that misconception could be there as well so i think it's both sides a little bit of a user and a little bit of the sales solution so that's uh that can be a challenge yeah i think on that misconception specifically right i think the accounts payable managers the people who buy products have been burnt a lot in the last so many decades this is not a new problem that we are talking about and they have gone through buying cycles being promised that hey this is going to solve this is the the pill that you're looking for magic fill that you're looking for right and it has they have been burned so many times right so um i can obviously understand um where the resistance is coming from at the end of the day you're looking at um does does this product really solve what i'm looking for looking for the outcomes right and does it create the least amount of friction in my business is it easy to implement and most importantly is it going to work for me right because it's my my business is unique my invoices are unique my way of matching accounting are all unique and you can show me a fancy demo that everything works fine but is it really going to work on my data so so unless you are really grounded on that on the outcomes and being able to verify it on your own process and see the outcomes there is um there is nothing that is ever going to solve it right so you've got to be oriented on that otherwise um you're going to face these problems all along and get burnt with even more set of applications right and that has created that resistance it's not that i don't think the finance teams are really against any kind of automation in fact they are the change agents in the companies that i see they are the ones who are who are bringing in more and more transformation but just having been have such bad experiences especially in voice automation has made them reluctant to go out and try new technologies yep yep all righty so you know we we're we're talking about invoice automation but we're also starting to hear you know a lot of different terminologies so we some people call it invoice automation some people call it ap automation some people call it p2p automation and there are differences um and maybe you could talk about that and do you think the marketplace understands the differences and sees it sure i can i can go with that that's a very interesting question uh mary because um i think it is um it is something that the market has created the companies have created i'll tell you my view on it right in the finance teams there are different obviously processes there is um uh order to cash process and when we talk about our cash process um it is the time when you order customer orders of product to you you build it you ship it and or you provide that service and then you invoice it right now traditionally that has been an auto management function the finance team actually comes in when you have the invoice ready right when you send the invoice out to the customer and then you follow up with them make sure is it's paid on time similarly on the ap side uh it's a it's called procurement process where you have procurement experts who are dealing with signing contracts with their vendors so that they are optimized on the pricing they have supply chains to take care of right and make sure that they can the right product at the right time so that they can build what the customer needs but then the finance portion actually happens when the vendor sends you the bill and that invoice is the one which you're supposed to make sure that it's accurate it has all the line items uh pricing that you were that you ordered for and then paid right and the finance process is the process that we the invoice process that we really care about finance teams care about why because you want to make sure that the right controls are built in you want to make sure that if my procurement team uh you know bought this product am i matching to the right po i'm am i receiving it along right by the end of the day the finance team is also worried about making sure that hey how do i um how do i categorize it how do i account for it which department do i uh get it into right do i route it to the right person for approval do i make sure that this accounting for this is deferred over the right uh period right and those are really uh finance tasks is there a duplicate payment that is happening right is the fraud happening so those are all finance tasks but what we have what we are being kind of taught in the market today is is actually uh if you fix procurement upfront all these things are taken care of right so so problem which is um which which with the cfo wants to solve is how do i make sure that my my invoice when i say my ap invoice to pay process is automated that's the problem i really want to solve i want to make sure that the inverse is a process in the least amount of time my invoices are not fraudulent they're no duplicates they're accounted correctly i won't you know impact my end users how do i take care of that and what we have been sold is to take care of that you got to fix the procurement right so the p2p is really a overarching process not really a finance process i would say it is a procurement process it stops at invoicing when the vendor invoices you and from invoicing uh receiving the vendors invoice although the payments is the finance process i i kind of call it from a finance point of view a spend to pay process because you could spend any way you want any kind of money that leaves the company is an accounts payable function it might be um something that you bought with procurement or it might be rent bills that you're paying it might be expenses that you're reimbursing these are all um uh money that is leaving the door which is a part of the finance function right so i think about this category what really finance our accounts payable team should care about is the spend to pay process the procurement leave it to the experts they care about procurement about purchase orders about pricing about supply chains that's not your domain you should you should care about how do i process an invoice in the least amount of time with the least amount of impact to my end users how do i make sure that my controls are 10 times as better than they are today how do i make sure my accounting is accurate how do i make sure that my um my pricing duplicates are all taken care of right and if you can if you can do that with the least amount of cost effort time right you got a winner in your accounts payable team so jamie do you think that the um accounts payable uh folks understand the difference you know i think by the way you can tell that and when it's you can tell the passions coming out in another so we could go on all day with this one uh i love it but i don't think we fundamentally understand the difference and i'll tell you the reason why is because again marketing marketing marketing teams confuse people with different terminology source to pay p2p procure to pay purchase to pay source to pay you know all of this terminology comes out and and i do agree agree on that if you're looking at the heart of what accounts payable is about it's a particular part of that process but actually what we need to do as ap professionals we need to understand the end-to-end process and the end-to-end solutions so far too often ap folk do a very good job at transacting making payments dealing with supply queries and all the good things that they do and they assume their system that they've been sold as a p2p solution and solves all the issues and clearly it doesn't so i think it's it's marketing which is the challenge that we've been that's been brought about but actually do i think that we should learn more i do absolutely i think we should be understanding the end-to-end process and again from from a point of view that you and i mary have spoken many a time that you know can we control the front end and the back end of the process we can't we can influence them and we can try and guide and train we control the middle b or towards the end of the process but guess what we do get the blame an awful lot for a lot of things to go wrong and that's the challenge and you know mary and i know that our users are our community and they're the hardest working people in in all of finance they really are um and sometimes the misconception around the solutions and what the terminology is yes we've got to educate ourselves but actually you sometimes you're gonna go back to basics haven't you you've got to look okay what's the fundamentals of what we do what can the system part do for us and then it comes down to training and education making sure that the requisition functions know what they're doing what the procurement teams know what they're doing the treasurers know what they're doing in terms of cash management and then you know the supplier on boarding process there's an awful lot to this which is you know component parts but i agree with with anna that in the accounts payable world we deal with a small section of this end-to-end solution but we're not off the hook we should understand it that's my view of the world well that's why i always tell people to make sure you understand what you're buying don't assume that what company a is offering is the same as company b especially if company b's is a lot less cost a lot less there's usually a reason for that yeah do you run into that yeah i mean uh there's a cost of automation right like jamie so so you what do you there's a cost associated with this and um that roi we're all means uh you know you know uh led to believe which is true that has to be a very positive roi for any investments that finance or any team makes right but i absolutely agree jamie that we got to understand as ap professionals the end-to-end process from the time an employee requests something or from the time you onboard a supplier what really happens right but but more often than not i see initiatives right that are being put in to solve the ap problem right the the end the blame as you said falls on ap that they want to solve the ap problem and and the and so solving the ap problem and focusing on that it becomes a multi-year project because you're trying to solve everything in the front end right which is right from onboarding a supplier putting the risk management system a supplier portal um area whatever you name it right and requisition system catalog system and creating huge amount of supplier friction and becomes a multi-year project right to get these things in place and when you put multi-year projects i come back to that misconception because hey at the end of the day at the end of those three years i thought this was going to be smooth like this everything is going to work and it doesn't work right so um what i what i meant to say was as ap folks right if you just focus on my problem right i'm not really worried about how you optimize your uh procurement i would love that you optimize your procurement because the end of the day that would help the company but if i want to solve this problem let me focus on this problem how do i get it done faster cheaper and see the roi quickly right so let me focus on how do i process my accounts invoices if it means that i have to uh spend a year trying to convince everyone to send my invoices electronically right i will go down that path that's that's the thing you want me to do but in the meantime this still has to be solved i should have a way of solving it the way the invoices are coming in today through my email or whatever the form it may be right so that's what i meant by um i want to make sure that the ap folks are successful and they're not drawn into this huge id projects and they're not sold by marketing into buying something um big a multi-million dollar investment when you're trying to solve something which is just a subset of all of that so we've been having this this interesting conversation and i realize we haven't introduced our wonderful panel our ceo panel to the audience so before we get to tips and advice perhaps you could each take a moment to introduce yourself um and and again why don't we start with you and aunt yeah sure so uh thanks mary uh my name is anan khali i'm the founder and ceo at absent um i founded the company in 2013 so for the last nine years we have been the forefront of building ai first applications in the finance areas and very proud to say that uh we've ground up look for solutions that we could solve for and today we have close to a thousand companies including the third option 500 companies um that work with us on um automating um on the spend side of things when i say spend side it means everything around accounts people invoices credit card transactions speak out transactions as well as expenses right dna expenses that's where our four day is um and really happy about the innovation that we have done and being able to you know talk about that to your um audience here mary and mr radford jamie radford i am the founder and ceo similar to announcements founder and ceo of the accounts pebble association um i have the best job in the world other than mary i have the best of job in the world i get to speak to hundreds and thousands of ap professionals throughout the world about things that affect our industry i have the pleasure of working with the lovely mary on many many projects um and you know what we we we're very focused in the uk and europe but we do dip our toes over when we work with mary into north america into the state so i'm the best job in the world mary come on we we you always ask us to introduce ourselves for the audience the people who might be watching oh they know me they're so tired of hearing about me i'm there from ap now i'm not letting you off the hook who are you mary come on tell the audience and i read write speak anything you can possibly do about accounts payable issues and like jamie said i would argue with him i have the best job in the world because one of the things that i really appreciate is we also and i think jamie will agree with me we have the best audience in the world and that that's what makes uh what we do um actually fun sometimes dare i say that all right now speaking of fun back to invoice automation now one of the issues that i've run into and i think jamie you run into when you talk to people is the um alarming uh i would say lack of utilization for some of the automation solutions that are purchased it's less than what you would expect i mean i guess i would and this might be naive have expected if you buy something today you'll have 99 utilization in a few months and that does not seem to be happening um why do you think this is causing this and what can we what can be done about it i'll throw my two cents in real quickly um i think there are many factors but three of which can be dealt with vendor reluctance ap staff reluctance um and sometimes the need to push vendors outside their normal routine and not you probably see this firsthand absolutely um and i think you hit the knee on its head maybe when you said that vendor electrons right uh the two sides to this coin on making this process work is the vendor and the ap person the vendor is going to do the thing that's the easiest for them they're not going to incur cost on sending you doing business within a very different way um unless there's a very big financial incentive right every person at the same time wants to do the work that's most efficient they want to do the work as efficiently as possible and they want to save their time so if this process whatever tool you're putting um process you've put in is actually adding to their work they're not going to do it right so understanding that those are the very simple things right so when i look at suppliers why are they reluctant like you said you change their process you actually introduced um a friction in the process of doing business with your company you ask them to probably submit it through some kind of a portal log in out there somebody in a different format sometimes maybe cost in in in doing that um so on and so forth and they are they're not ready to do it right uh because you're not the only company asking them there are thousands trying to do the same thing with them and it simply doesn't work it works if you have a very high volume maybe of invoices that are coming from them that they will do it for you but not in most cases the second is when i look at it is from the ap side what is the goal of the ap person what was promised to you was this is automation so when i think about automation i think about hey my car is an automatic i don't have to change the gears right so simply changes on its own and if my automatic car behaved that i could have to make sure that uh the gear actually changed you're asking me to double check everything and the invoice automation system if i kind of draw the analogy today they are rules based they are template driven they are ocr they are saying and the ocrs kind of go all the way i'm 90 accurate i'm 90 i'm 60 percent accurate 80 accurate the problem is you don't know when you're not accurate when you're wrong right and the ocrs don't know that uh because they are just simply telling you that hey i got this so if you have to put your time in reviewing all of that all of the work that is being done if the rules are fired correctly right if the the template has worked as it is supposed to be and the invoice format has not been changed by the supplier if the accounting rules are fired correctly you are actually adding more work to my process right and if i if it's not automating it if i have to spend time doing it i might as well do it do this whole thing hold the process myself right so that's i think the the friction the the wrong expectations we put on the ap side which doesn't really pan out into making them more efficient is one aspect of it and the second aspect is absolutely the suppliers whom we are creating friction so if you solve both of them if you um put your process in voice automation process in the natural flow of how suppliers want to work with you right without training them without changing their process you would take care of that side of the friction right you would eliminate that friction suppliers are saying okay you are just processing it and wow i got paid on time great right i got the response back on time great right and from the ap team you're saying that hey i can guarantee you that this invoice got processed without any review without any um we call it touchless and testless also people look at it differently touchless doesn't mean just not touching it physically testing also means not reviewing it right you should not put any eyes on it if you have to put eyes on it and check it it's not touchless right so if i have to if i have to do all of that right if i if you eliminate that work then absolutely i'm going to use it that's going to make me more efficient and i know that it's going to be um completely compliant accurate when i process those invoices okay jamie do you see the same thing in the uk yeah we do and again i agree with your three points mary i think um you know it's the vendor reluctance it's the stuff can be a bit reluctant and then obviously vendors go out going outside the normal if you like but i i want to give you another three you know and i think it comes down to these three things it's firstly planning what are you planning to do what you're trying to achieve you know what what's what is it you're trying to do before you even engage with it with an automation provider um then it's communication you know it all comes down to communication you know communicate with your staff communicate with the vendor community communicate with stakeholders and then thirdly it's the expectation what is it you're going to try and achieve um you know if you're going to try to eat the elephants and solve you know world hunger and world peace then guess what it's not going to work so effectively those three stage approach and it goes back to the planning you know do you understand the current processes and does that does a solution that you're looking to buy fix or assist in that process and are you communicating correctly with everybody that's involved including your vendors and then just set realistic expectation if you can do those three things then guess what you've got at least half a chance of winning and then the rest of it comes down to training people and actually then working hard to make those things come up come about i can remember being at a credit conference where i was invited to speak and talking about this and afterwards one of the women came up to me and she literally screamed at me i have six thousand customers do you expect me to go into six thousand portals and you know what she had a point straight yeah okay so one of the solutions and obviously it's a simple solution it won't solve all the problems but i think it will go a long way is how important do you think it is for the ability for an automation solution to be able to read an invoice from an email um without requiring the supplier to do anything different and then i'm guessing you're yeah you're maybe asking me uh questions which are close to my heart so obviously i can't uh you know wait to answer them but it comes back to the to the back of the basics we talked about previously reducing the friction and if i look at what the actual process is for an ap person if your majority of your invoices come through email which is how most invoices come in right um you should be able to read them now invoices a lot of things that come through email the invoices that come through email there are forms that come through email the inquiries that come through email right and if my job is to go and filter through all of those understand what's an invoice what's an attachment download it upload it and then process the invoice and then make sure that my um my automation tool got it right extracted right correctly right it's just work for me right so from from my point of view if i'm looking at invoice automation it just has to be holistic it means it's got to do everything that needs to happen in the life cycle of processing an invoice from the time i receive it through email to the time i read it i read it and understand it i understand yeah this is an invoice oh what my business policy is should it have appear should it not or maybe the invoice doesn't have a po but based on the amount and historically the knowledge that i have this has to be matched to a po one or maybe this is not an invoice match po but looking at reading and understanding that invoice oh i figured out this is my laptop that i'm buying and it is being shipped to my address in in atlanta right it has to go to the south my department goes out so all this knowledge that happens right and then i entered it i i route it to the correct person and that's how i process the invoice so if i have to think of invoice automation it requires me to read the email it requires me to read the invoice understand the invoice apply my domain knowledge about ap my chart of accounts my routing my my policy and then enter the pro invoice accurately and then process it all the way to the right getting the right person for me all these processes have to be automated uh by the invoice automation tool you cannot have a bot doing one piece of it somebody else doing applying a template for uh invoice and then not handling the remaining invoices and that's what i think about ai when i talked about ai ai is understanding um language understanding an image right just like a human would so it's not about ocr that that thing is decades old it's about understanding it if your ai can do it this process gets automated from reading an email extracting the information of that invoice entering it accurately making sure it goes to the right department right account code understanding what a marketing expense is versus an id expense versus the cost of goods sold all that deep domain knowledge that an ap person actually has gets transferred from that ai and automates the processing of that invoice jamie do you agree yeah absolutely you're not going to say no are you no look we've got an absolute expert here mary so he's i'm hardly going to challenge uh but but again what i will add to that is that um you know i'm a big advocate of networking putting the message of cancer people out there and using tools such as linkedin people often use tools such as linkedin in all the wrong ways because they assume that you know linkedin is just outreach send your message out it's the same when you run an automation project if you didn't have automation and you just had people on paper would you say to somebody um only process the perfect invoices and all the rest throw in a bid or put in a draw you would have a solution that dealt with every single invoice that came through the door so the idea of having an automation solution that can't deal with emails or can't deal with certain types of email formats is beyond me you know if you're going to go and run a project do it for all don't do it for a select group don't do it by the ones that it can handle so in the old days when it was just all template driven um that was a challenge because you had to keep re-educating the templates and all this good stuff so all the new technologies coming through but going back to the point we mentioned earlier in the session go and buy the right process design look at what you're trying to fix and buy the right solution go and choose the solution that fits your business and your and sort of your outputs rather than have somebody sell you something that ultimately might not fix the problem and actually talking about your problem earlier about the user adoption uh mary that goes back to that point doesn't it you know if a solution isn't fit for purpose guess what people are just not going to use it your supplier's not going to use it and your staff are not going to use it so going back to basics make sure it does everything you expect it to and actually you should expect it to do everything and a little more the roadmap for you your providers the solution providers your automation providers you should be assisting in that roadmap of what future-proof things you wanted to achieve as you go through your journey your automation journey all right so now i'm getting i don't have invoice automation and i'm getting ready to start a project and i'm looking at people what piece of advice would you give them getting started blank slate so you you can get the person started on the right on on the right path and why don't we let jamie start and that one and then uh uh you can uh i'm sure you have some really great advice an aunt jamie how what would you do if you were just getting started you know i go back to my three points earlier mary you know i think it's all about planning you know i think um far so often you know you talk to a solutions provider and the first thing they do is they give you some perfect customers to go and talk to you know they're they're perfect solution consultant who have gone through a journey they're on their website and don't get me wrong they've got a good view of what's happened in their world um so firstly you know what what is he trying to achieve plan out process map make sure you understand your own processes that's number one secondly then when you come to the next stage which is right okay what industry i am in and what am i trying to achieve who do i want to go and talk to now so not necessarily the customers that have been put forward from the solution provider but actually somebody in my industry somebody's had similar issues go talk to them and also talk to the ones that didn't have a perfect journey the ones that would probably give you some lessons some of the things that you may not even plan for the time it takes the people the resource and the planning and all the things there so that's number one number two communication make sure you've got a really strong communication plan you know the only way as humans we push back on any change we always do if you communicate it makes it a little easier so tell your teams tell your business tell your suppliers and what the plan is so what are you trying to work towards and then the last thing really in a good project for automation projects have realistic expectations of what you're trying to achieve and if it is a phased approach phase it but make sure that every time you get to phase one and it gets it's achieved celebrate celebrate the success of each level of the project and then people will come with you to the next level next level so that's more of a user journey i think we'll listen to the expert now um mary so that's a user that's my view from a user point of view okay i'm writing down celebrate the successes i'm really interested you probably have a very different um approach and i i i agree with what jamie said right of course like you got to talk to customers what worked what didn't work but i fundamentally come back to what we talked previously right why do these fail because um it creates too much friction right and my my role as an ap person is to automate these processes as quickly as possible i want to get my roi within three months make sure that in six months maybe eighty percent of my invoices become touchless right without uh educating my suppliers great suppliers should feel it that something has happened in your company changing your company rather than in the real world yeah yeah versus telling them sending their and say please change this please do this please do that right that doesn't work it's too much change management too much time spent so when i uh what we talked previously mary my process is i receive invoices through email and i process them all the way right if that's my goal in invoice automation don't believe whatever your vendor says don't believe their slides ask them to give your email address you should be able to power the invoice you should let it see by itself without anyone touching it and go into the tool the tool should be as easy to use as as you've nobody taught you how to use facebook or youtube either to be has easy to use as that right so uh my my point is very simple uh if that's what your process is your process which is most likely most companies have the default process my invoices are coming by email they they should be automatically read through email they should be entered i want to see the accuracy of all the lines entered and i should know based on my data how my invoices come in right what level of touchless processing is going to happen with this invoice automation tool and put everyone every one of the vendors that you're considering through the same places right ask them to do the same thing i don't want to see you giving me a demo a fancy demo right and like jamie said talk to a customer or i don't want you to ask me to give me your invoices and then i'll process them and i'll show it to them we know how that works right you what you can do behind the scenes ask them give me a this is what my real life is right and you have not done any training you have not done any of things that sort i just want to see how it works and you will see for yourself what is the one you will differentiate the vendors who really just are saying that they have a tool which is ai driven versus vendors who really have it right and are ready to throw their product out there in the wild right and once you see that you will be able to do a very fair comparison between what happens right and um we have gone through that multiple times over we let uh for our customers and prospects we want to try our product we simply tell them hey okay how many invoices you want to process great here's an email address for you um throw your invoices here's your login go and check it out right um you put in whatever invoices you want we will tell you what worked what didn't work and what kind of training the machine has to go through and and secondly we all talk about ai and we say it learns make sure that it learns and the only way it can learn is if you if you train it and that should be a separate process so it's interesting that um you talked about amazon or you talked about netflix initially right maybe that you didn't train it your actions trained it by itself so for example when in google when uh somebody puts in ap technology week right right and a bunch of results come in and you click on result uh google knows that you clicked on it and you spent some time on it so it's automatically learning it's ai is learning that this is the right result and it's going to move it up into the search results right so you are training the ai that this is what um what i really um you know it talks to me that this is the result that i want similarly if i look back to ap if i get an invoice in and maybe the invoice is not accurately extracted or coded i should be able to change it save it because that's my normal uh way i work and maybe when i process three invoices similarly the system should learn by itself right if your ai is really working the system should learn by itself without me doing anything right or my format changes system should learn by itself so those are ways you can really separate out the marketing uh slides that you're going to see around ai and invoice automation versus whether it is working on your data or not right so i strongly urge everyone there is too much um you know slidewear out there marketing out there around invoice automation just work with a with somebody do a trial it doesn't take more than a couple of hours your time sending emails when i say send emails customers simply forward their emails that they've got from their vendors right because you know that's how i get my emails and let's see and then they test you on training hey did i do it three times and it learned on its own i know this ai really works right so though i would say do it on your data look at the outcomes and then do a comparison between all the vendors is it fair to say or not that if you get a solution that is able to to read invoices from email and you have most of your vendors sending you invoices by email now that you don't even have to tell them you've made this change absolutely because the the what you see is that uh they don't know what they're changing you're not really creating any friction in their process so there's no question of adoption there's no question of failure because of adoption right okay that goes away but in fact what you see is that the processing time you're paying them on time you are taking care of discounts for your company because your processing time reduces to literally minutes right from the time an email is sent to the time it is ready to pay right or it is sent for approval right and you are seeing a better relationship with the with the vendors because you are processing the invoices on time they don't have to follow up on whether what are the status of my invoices um did you guys process it and it's very consistent way of doing things rather than hoping that oh this ap clerk got it they didn't pay attention this other one got it right um as as a company you don't have to worry about churn you don't have to worry about you know employees leaving they had all the knowledge and nonsense is gone i don't know how do i'm going to process the invoice i don't have the set of documentation written down right so all that goes away because that knowledge that processing gets transferred from somebody's head onto the machine and the machine does it by saying good and so that makes you um if you're less dependent on that key employee especially at a smaller company where that can be a real problem absolutely because the the key around here how does uh and i think any of our audience will ask how would the machine know what my business is because what what the true ai really does is based on learning it is not based on rules so the way that knowledge gets transferred is by looking at your data what any ai system will do is when they connect into your erp or whatever system you have they will just look at the invoices it might be a couple of hundred invoices right but they look at your invoices it will within minutes that you look how you coded them um how you routed them how you match them and the system the ai system should be immediately be able to tell you hey i'm i'm good i learned from your system from your invoices the way you have coded it right the way you have approved it or we've routed it have you matched it how you do your business that you're you're actually coding into this particular account or this particular department or this particular cost center based on certain attributes those attributes are not rules those attributes are simply what the ai learns based on looking at different sites of invoices that's kind of the how you transfer that intelligence that the key employee has the key ap person has into the machine and then it doesn't go away perfect there are five sessions in our ap technology week programs we put them all in a playlist you can watch them now the link is in the show notes below and on youtube links will appear momentarily as always we greatly appreciate your thumbs up your shares your comments and your subscribes and guys you agree