Solution 01
Accounts Payable, run by four agents.
AP is not hard. AP exceptions are hard. Four agents own the invoice lifecycle between them, and the work that reaches a person is the work that genuinely needed one.
The agents
Who does what
Invoice Processing
Capture through posting: reads the invoice whatever channel it arrived on, matches it, codes it, posts it.
Supplier Portal
Validation at source. Suppliers submit and check status themselves instead of emailing AP.
Case Management
Every exception becomes a case with an owner, an age and a proposed resolution.
Vendor Reconciliation
Supplier statements tied out against the ledger, with the differing lines surfaced.
The work itself
What runs between arrival and payment
Eight things happen to an invoice. The agents own all of them, and hand back only what they cannot settle.
Intelligent supplier portal
Electronic submission with validation applied at the point of entry, so matching and approval routing start from a clean document.
Automated invoice indexing
Invoices consolidated and segregated by purchase order and by supplier relationship, rather than landing in one undifferentiated queue.
Intelligent data extraction
Varied invoice formats read without templates, with data cleansing and line-item matching applied as the document is understood.
Validation engine
Rule-based and intelligence-based validations run across invoice data, the purchase order and the goods receipt note together.
Approvals and workflows
Approvals collected automatically from function heads and budget owners, following the routing your policy already implies.
Dashboards and monitoring
Early-payment rebate opportunities, cash position and supplier transparency visible while the work is happening, not after it.
Advanced analytics
Cash forecasting and working-capital optimisation built on live payables rather than a period-end extract.
e-Invoicing
Global supplier connectivity, so more of the volume arrives structured and less of it needs interpreting.
e-Invoicing
Four ways a supplier can reach you
Suppliers will not all adopt one channel, and waiting for them to is how e-invoicing programmes stall. Four routes run in parallel.
Supplier portal
A customisable portal with template-based uploads and real-time status visibility. Suited to the long tail who will not build an integration.
Direct B2B / EDI
High-volume suppliers integrate straight from their own ERP over EDI or XML.
Network interoperability
Reach suppliers already transacting on other business networks without asking them to move to yours.
PDF and paper
The formats that never go away, handled end to end rather than rekeyed.
Standards
Peppol, and why it matters
Peppol is a set of artefacts and specifications enabling cross-border e-procurement, governed by OpenPeppol. It lets buyers and suppliers exchange compliant documents to a common standard rather than negotiating a format per trading partner — which is what makes cross-border AP scale without a bespoke integration for every country.
Exceptions
Where AP automation usually breaks
Most AP tools automate the easy path and hand you a review queue for the rest. The exception taxonomy is the product. At a top global automaker, fifteen exception types accounted for roughly ninety per cent of everything the agents met — duplicates, short-pays, price and quantity variances, missing receipts, coding ambiguity. Each one has a defined resolution path and an agent that owns it.
Attributed outcomes
Numbers with a customer on them
Top global automaker
85% straight-through processing within 12 weeks across 150,000 invoices a month and 5,000 suppliers. Around a day to process one invoice became about three minutes, and ROI landed inside six months. RPA had already failed there because the templates kept changing.
Global real estate services firm
40% AP cost reduction across 400 offices in 60 countries, with 55% touchless straight-through processing and 90+ validations running on every invoice. The remainder went through exception workflows.
Global freight forwarder
70% faster cycle times, a 30% improvement in DPO, 75% less time resolving exceptions, and 80%+ invoice coding accuracy across 58 locations.
Global pharma distributor
900,000 invoices a year across retail, dropship and carrier channels, up to 90% straight-through and $1.2M in annual productivity saving. Integrated with SAP, a mainframe and Oracle Transport Management.
Commercials
AP-as-a-Service
AP can be consumed as a service rather than stood up as a project. That shortens the path to a first live process, and it moves the cost from a capital line to an operating one — which is usually the difference between a pilot that starts this quarter and one that starts next year.
The honest part
What the first weeks actually look like
Autonomy starts moderate. On an unfamiliar invoice format the agents escalate rather than guess, and the exception rate in week one is higher than it will be in week twelve — the automaker deployment took twelve weeks to reach 85%, not twelve days. What changes over that period is the taxonomy: each resolution your team makes is absorbed, so the same shape does not come back a second time.
Questions
Asked before every deployment
What is AP automation with AI agents?
An agent owns the invoice from arrival to payment: it captures the document from any channel, validates it against the purchase order and goods receipt note, codes and posts it to your ERP, and escalates only the exceptions it cannot settle.
How much of AP can run straight through?
It varies by data quality and by where you set your confidence threshold. A top global automaker reached 85% straight-through in twelve weeks; a global real estate services firm runs 55% touchless with the remainder through exception workflows.
How is this different from RPA for invoice processing?
RPA follows templates and breaks when they change — that is precisely why it had already failed at the automaker before the agents were deployed. Agents read unstructured documents, score their own confidence, and escalate rather than guessing.
What invoice channels are supported?
Four run in parallel: a supplier portal for the long tail, direct B2B/EDI and XML integration for high-volume suppliers, interoperability with other business networks, and PDF or paper handled end to end.
What is Peppol and do you support it?
Peppol is a set of specifications for cross-border e-procurement governed by OpenPeppol, allowing compliant document exchange to a common standard. It is one of the interoperability routes suppliers can reach you on.
Which ERPs does AP integrate with?
Your ERP remains the system of record. SAP and Oracle integrations are proven in production deployments, alongside mainframe and Oracle Transport Management at a pharma distributor.
Can accounts payable be consumed as a service?
Yes. An AP-as-a-Service model is available, which shortens the path to a first live process compared with a conventional implementation project.
See it running before you decide.
The tour is the product, not a video of it. Walk the floor yourself — no form in front of it.