AI has transformed driving, advertising, e-commerce, personal assistants, and customer service. Now, AI for accounts payable is automating the finance back-office—and the results are dramatic.

The problem with traditional AP automation

AP teams have struggled with long cycle times and high-cost invoice processing for decades. Traditional automation solutions haven't fully solved the problem because they try to change supplier behavior—requiring portals and e-invoices instead of the PDF attachments suppliers actually send.

A modern approach uses AI to autonomously process invoices straight from your AP inbox, eliminating that friction entirely.

Understanding the levels of AP autonomy

AppZen uses the Autonomous Index for Accounts Payable to measure automation maturity across five levels:

  • Level 0: Fully manual processing—everything done by hand
  • Levels 1-3: Assisted automation (20-60% autonomy)—tools help humans make better decisions
  • Level 4: AI autonomy with human oversight—the system handles most tasks and knows when to escalate
  • Level 5: Complete autonomy—not yet achieved by any technology

What Level 4 autonomous AP looks like

At Level 4, an AI-based AP system can autonomously extract, read, understand, and make process decisions. It performs all tasks—including monitoring and correcting itself—based on your company's AP policies. The AI knows where it can and cannot make decisions, proactively engaging human operators only when needed so nothing falls through the cracks.

AppZen's Autonomous AP is a Level 4 application. Our customers achieve 60-80% autonomy in areas like data extraction, PO matching, non-PO accounting, and audit validation. For companies that were manually processing every invoice, even small autonomy improvements deliver massive cost and efficiency savings.

How autonomous invoicing works

With autonomous invoicing, AI extracts PDF invoices from your AP inbox, then validates, classifies, matches, reviews, and approves documents in real-time with minimal manual intervention.

AI-powered AP automation applications can:

  • Read header and line-level descriptions and logos
  • Understand the content and context of each invoice
  • Validate data against your supplier master
  • Predict GL account segments (spend category, cost center, location)
  • Execute PO matching automatically
  • Flag special accounting treatments like prepaid expenses
  • Audit 100% of invoices for duplicates—across both invoices and T&E receipts

Any further approvals and GL posting happen within your P2P and ERP systems.

The business impact

With autonomous AP working alongside your ERP and P2P systems, finance leaders can:

  • Process invoices at less than $3 each
  • Audit 100% of invoices and expense receipts for duplicates and fraud before payment
  • Complete processing in under one day

Faster time to value

AppZen's AI models are pre-trained on over 60 million invoice and expense documents. Unlike traditional automation systems that take years to show meaningful results, AppZen customers begin autonomous operations immediately and realize transformation in months.

Once the AI receives additional training on your company's invoice data, ROI increases further. By providing access to invoice history, daily PO feeds, vendor master data, and your AP inbox, the models learn from feedback. Customers who see 50% autonomy in the first three months can reach 80% autonomy quickly.

 

Ready to see autonomous AP in action? Learn how AppZen AP Automation can transform your accounts payable operations.