Are you searching for ways to leverage AI in your finance and finops workflows? If so, you’re in the right place. By leveraging AI into your workflows, you’ll be able to transform your repetitive tasks, improve information retrieval, and accelerate your financial operations too. Discover how AI can:
- Automate repetitive tasks: Learn how AI can automate routine interactions with various financial systems, drastically reducing the time your team spends on mundane activities.
- Enhance information retrieval: Explore how AI can simplify finding necessary information across multiple applications, ensuring your team has instant access to the data they need.
- Optimize financial operations: Understand how AI-driven solutions can expedite Finop's ticket resolutions, minimizing delays and reducing the burden on your financial operations teams.
This blog was inspired by the expert discussion during our AI at Work Webinar: Different Ways AI Agents Can Supercharge Your Finance Operations.
It will also guide you through the power of different AI agents to enhance your finance operations, and is part of a broader webinar series covering various domains and systems such as Workday, Coupa, and Jira.
By the end, you’ll not only be equipped with knowledge about AI’s transformative potential in finance but also practical insights into optimizing budget management, improving risk management, and automating expense reporting.
What is artificial intelligence (AI) in finance?
AI in finance uses advanced algorithms and machine learning models to automate, enhance, and streamline various financial tasks and operations. Because AI systems can process massive amounts of data, recognize patterns, and make predictions or decisions, AI is well suited to improve efficiency, accuracy, and strategic decision-making within almost all financial touchpoints.
How is AI used in finance?
AI is used in finance to automate repetitive tasks, enhance data analysis, improve decision-making, and provide better customer service. It is deployed in risk assessment, fraud detection, investment predictions, personalized customer interactions, and regulatory compliance. AI in finance helps support different use cases and personas, from finance ops and executive teams to customers – really all of your internal and external collaborators.
By leveraging AI, financial teams and institutions can significantly reduce operational costs, increase accuracy, and offer more tailored services to all stakeholders.
Applications of AI in finance and financial ops
AI has a wide range of applications in finance, including:
- Automated trading: AI algorithms analyze market data in real-time to execute trades at optimal times, improving investment efficiency significantly.
- Fraud detection: Machine learning models accurately identify unusual transactions and fraudulent activities, providing enhanced security for financial institutions.
- Credit scoring: AI assesses creditworthiness faster and more accurately by analyzing vast amounts of data, reducing default risks for lenders.
- Customer service: Chatbots and virtual assistants provide instant support and personalized recommendations, enhancing the overall customer experience effectively.
- Compliance: AI helps ensure adherence to regulatory requirements by continuously monitoring transactions and reporting anomalies, mitigating compliance risks entirely.
When it comes to finance ops, there are just as diverse of applications, such as:
- Purchase order management: AI-powered systems can use natural language processing (NLP) to understand search queries and rapidly retrieve PO information from databases, regardless of how the request is phrased.
- Check pending approvals: AI can automate approval workflows, sending reminders and notifications to approvers. AI can prioritize approvals based on factors like urgency or supplier importance.
- Calculate purchase order balances: AI can automate the calculation of PO balances by integrating with ERP systems and financial databases. AI can identify discrepancies between POs, invoices, and receipts, flagging potential errors.
- Expense and report management: AI can automate expense report creation by extracting data from receipts and credit card statements. AI can enforce expense policies and flag non-compliant expenses.
- Automation and document analysis: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) combined with AI can automate tasks like data entry, invoice processing, and report generation.
Benefits of AI in finance
The benefits of AI in finance are multifaceted, including:
- Enhanced efficiency: By automating routine tasks like processing purchase orders and managing expense reports, AI allows financial operations teams to focus on complex activities such as financial forecasting and strategic planning.
- Improved accuracy: AI reduces errors in financial processes, such as reconciling accounts and tracking stock levels, ensuring more precise data analysis and better decision-making for budget management.
- Cost savings: Automation in handling tasks like invoice processing and purchase order approvals cuts down on operational costs by reducing the reliance on manual labor in financial departments.
- Scalability: AI systems can swiftly adapt to handle increased workloads, such as surges in transaction volumes during peak financial periods, without incurring additional costs.
- Better risk management: AI provides advanced tools for identifying anomalies in financial transactions and potential compliance issues, helping financial professionals mitigate risks before they escalate.
Enter the AI agents
AI agents can perceive their environment, reason about necessary steps, and act to solve problems independently. That’s why AI agents can alleviate these burdens by retrieving or generating answers and acting on users' behalf.
An AI agent is an autonomous or semi-autonomous software entity designed to perform specific tasks or operations, such as checking pending approvals or managing expense reports.
AI agents leverage machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and other AI technologies to understand their environment, learn from interactions, and make informed decisions.
These agents can be designed for various functions, including customer service, data analysis, and process automation, providing significant value across different business processes.
By taking over repetitive and time-consuming tasks, agentic AI helps finance professionals by giving them more time to focus on high-value activities. Its autonomous learning and adapting capabilities make it superior to non-agentic AI, which requires more manual intervention and cannot operate independently.
10 ways AI agents support finance operations use cases
Your finance operations team relies on software like Coupa, SAP Ariba, and SAP Concur to manage your expense tracking, procurement processes, and travel expense management.
These platforms let you streamline workflows, improve compliance, and enhance visibility into financial transactions, enabling more efficient and effective financial operations – but now AI agents are helping to automate many of these use cases.
1. Retrieve purchase order details in Coupa
Employees in a busy finance department often need instant access to purchase order details. Instead of navigating through multiple layers in Coupa, employees can ask an AI agent to query open purchase orders for the information they need.
The AI agent can provide comprehensive details about a purchase order, including supplier name, address, order date, and status. Employees can access this information quickly and seamlessly from their chat interface by integrating with communication platforms like Microsoft Teams or Slack.
2. Check pending approvals in Coupa
Managing approvals is crucial but can be a time-consuming task if not streamlined. Many employees have pending approvals that require their immediate attention. With an AI agent, employees can retrieve a list of their pending approvals in Coupa with a simple command.
This saves them from manually checking the Coupa system, ensuring they stay on top of their tasks and maintain productivity. The AI agent can send timely reminders and updates, helping employees prioritize approvals.
3. List top suppliers in Coupa
Having quick access to a list of top suppliers is essential for making informed purchasing decisions and ensuring compliance with company policies. Instead of manually searching through records, employees can ask the AI agent for a list of approved suppliers.
The AI agent can provide a curated list of top suppliers for specific categories, such as office supplies or IT equipment. This saves time and ensures that employees choose from compliant and preferred suppliers, reducing the risk of procurement issues.
4. Check stock levels in SAP Ariba
Before making new purchases or onboarding employees, knowing the available stock of necessary equipment or materials is essential. An AI agent integrated with SAP Ariba can provide real-time stock levels upon request.
This allows employees to quickly determine if they have what they need or need to place new orders. By accessing this information instantly, companies can avoid delays in operations and ensure smooth onboarding processes.
5. Calculate purchase order balances in SAP Ariba
Managing purchase orders involves keeping track of payments and remaining balances. An AI agent can assist by calculating the balances of purchase orders after payments are made.
Employees can ask the AI agent for the remaining balance of any purchase order, ensuring accurate financial records and better budget management. This feature helps streamline financial operations by reducing manual calculation errors and providing up-to-date financial insights.
6. Manage expense reports in SAP Concur
Expense management can be cumbersome and prone to errors if done manually. AI agents can simplify this by managing various tasks within SAP Concur. Employees can retrieve open expense reports, add new entries, and even attach receipts directly through the AI agent.
This automation ensures accuracy in reporting and reduces the time spent on managing expenses. The AI agent can also provide reminders for pending reports and deadlines, helping employees comply with company policies.
7. Automate repetitive tasks
Daily finance operations involve numerous repetitive tasks as generating responses to common queries, retrieving necessary data, and performing routine calculations.
By handling these tasks automatically, AI agents free employees to focus on more strategic and impactful activities. This improves overall efficiency and productivity within the finance team.
8. Use AI PDF Summarizers for document analysis
Managing and understanding large financial documents can be challenging. Using an AI PDF Summarize feature allows you to upload and interact with financial documents through an AI-driven interface. The AI agent can summarize the content, answer specific questions, and provide detailed citations from the document.
This enhanced document management and analysis help employees quickly comprehend complex information, making it easier to derive insights and make informed decisions.
9. Click-through to pending approvals
Managing approvals requires the ability to quickly access pending items directly from your communication platform. This capability can significantly streamline workflows.
This setup enhances both efficiency and accessibility, allowing users to manage approvals seamlessly without navigating away from their primary workspace.
10. Attaching receipts in Concur
Handling expense reports often involves attaching receipts, and integrating this feature into an AI agent can save considerable time and effort. This configuration makes the process seamless, ensuring that all necessary documentation is included efficiently.
Transform your finance operations with AI
Everyone can instantly access the power of AI agents with Moveworks AI Assistant.
Moveworks meets your employees wherever they are — from enterprise messaging apps, intranets, service portals, and more — to create intuitive, conversational experiences with trustworthy responses.
- Employees can message Moveworks AI Assistant, which uses agentic AI to select a plugin to complete work, from Coupa to SAP Ariba to SAP Concur, and many more
- Our 500+ plugin library makes it easy to work across your applications, and enables seamless financial operations
- Moveworks Creator Studio extends Moveworks' AI Assistant into the entirety of your technology ecosystem, lets you create custom use cases that for different domains, departments, and applications
In all these ways and more, Moveworks provides intelligent, automated solutions to enhance productivity and efficiency in finance operations and beyond.
Watch our expert discussion for yourself. Discover the AI at Work Webinar: 8 Ways AI Agents Can Supercharge Your Finance Operations.
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