Celebrating Ten Years of AI Innovation

Ten years of AI-first innovation

At our recent AppZen On Tour event in Chicago, I had the chance to share a proud moment with our customers, detailing how far AppZen and finance AI have developed over the last 10 years. It brought back memories of founding the company in 2013 with my co-founder and our CTO, Kunal Verma, in the shared conviction that artificial intelligence was going to fundamentally change the way people work. Back then, people didn’t immediately grasp the business context of what we were trying to do. Was it machine learning software? A new type of analytics? To them, it sounded like a trendy science experiment. To us, it was an exciting new technology we couldn’t wait to employ.

Right from the start, we took an “AI-first” approach, weaving artificial intelligence capabilities throughout our products, their decision-making processes, and their customer interactions. Rather than viewing it as an add-on or a tool, we put our AI technology at the forefront of everything we create. To demonstrate its predictive abilities, we developed AppZen Expense Audit, with finance domain knowledge in T&E and spend policies, and the ability to read and deeply understand documents like receipts–something impossible for analytics to do.

Thanks to transformers, AI is everywhere

Today, AI is no longer just an academic subject. It’s everywhere, whether you’re searching the web, writing an email, or using your washing machine. This democratization of generative AI was the result of the introduction of the revolutionary Transformer technology that powers large language models like ChatGPT. Transformers speed up the ability of artificial intelligence to understand the meaning behind writing and images. Once in the hands of entrepreneurs and the general public, AI suddenly became “real.” It could do things that previously only human intelligence and human creativity could handle, like creating music or images. At AppZen, our R&D teams have been using transformer technology for the last three years in order to fully automate human decisions.

The 3 keys to autonomous finance processes

From Expense Audit for T&E to Autonomous AP for Accounts Payable teams to AppZen Inbox for solving your query management challenges, our suite of solutions is delivering on our mission to make finance processes autonomous across all your systems and workflows. When a machine automates the completion of tasks from end to end without any direct assistance from you, we call that an “autonomous” process. This is incredibly hard to do because your business is continuously evolving and changing, often requiring human finance expertise and company knowledge. While we don’t believe any business process will ever be 100% autonomous, AppZen has proven we can get all the way to 80% autonomous–in some cases, even higher.

There are 3 key things an AI must do to make a business process autonomous. Our AI is built to handle all three of these situations:

1. Guarantee it can make accurate, human-like decisions with confidence
2. Recognize when it’s unsure and seamlessly hand off decision-making to a human
3. Improve its own decision-making by learning from your feedback and decisions

Safe, customized AI automation

Having worked with hundreds of companies, we also understand that every business’ processes are unique, complex, and security-driven. Unlike other solutions providers in the market, our AI platform is customizable and every solution can be adapted to suit your processes, rules, and policies. In order to do that, we’ve built enterprise-grade finance AI solutions that learn continuously and offer collective intelligence across all customers. In order to do so while keeping your data secure, we built our platform architecture from the ground up with guard rails and infrastructure that give our AI the security and data privacy your organization requires.

Delighting your stakeholders with best-in-class finance operations

What excites me most about our AI is its ability to take away “non-work” for your employees, managers, and suppliers. These are your stakeholders, the people who have to deal with the repercussions of time wasted, expenses that go unreimbursed for too long, or supplies that remain unpaid. Imagine the impact that your finance team can have on the rest of the business, giving time back to people who would rather be doing what they were hired for, like working with customers, building products, or handling customer service. Creating an amazing stakeholder experience means a positive NPS for your finance organization alongside unmatched productivity. You become the new best-in-class.

AppZen is at the forefront of finance AI development

We’re excited to see the world enter the next era of AI innovation. We know we’re well positioned with the experience, technology, and expertise to transform finance teams with AI-first innovation. And we look forward to partnering with our customers, who trust us to create those innovations and keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible together.

If you’re interested in learning more and you’re in the EMEA region, we hope you’ll join us in London on Tuesday, 7 November. Or get in touch–we’d love to talk about how we can partner with you, too.