Best Ways to Use AI for Procurement & Accounts Payable (2026)

If you're still processing invoices manually or chasing down your stakeholders today to get approvals through email, Slack messages, you're wasting your finance team's time on activities that can easily be automated by AI today. The truth is many finance leaders don't know how far AI has come in the last 12 months. We are not talking about simple automation. We're talking about systems that can automatically process your invoices, read the data, match those invoices with purchase orders, but also do the follow-up. So everywhere where you need to have a manual follow-up. That's done by AI today. So in this video, I'm going to break down 5 areas in which AI is transforming procurement and accounts payable today. And these are the tools you can start using today to save your team hours every week. So let's dive in. So the first is OCR and intelligent invoice capture. OCR is not new, as you all know. OCR stands for optical character recognition, and traditionally you use this technology to read the data from like an invoice document, and then somebody can validate and create an invoice from that. So that's not new. What is new is with the help of AI now, traditionally what you used to do manually can be fully automated. So what do I mean? So for example, taking an invoice from an inbox, uploading that to a system or whatever the accounting system, entering the data manually. And because of manual data entry, as the volume increase, you have lots and lots of errors, right, happening in the invoice capturing process. So now imagine having a system where it kind of reads your email as the invoice comes in, it looks at the document, it pulls all the information, then it validates that information. Is the date valid? Is the amount valid? It also extracts the information that is missing, right? So traditionally what we see with our clients is when they are manually entering the data, they just put abbreviations like services for $5,000. And 6 months down the line, you want to see where exactly did we spend the money? There is no detail, right? You have to go actually look at the invoice copy, which is very time consuming. So now with the purchase order and so on. But it doesn't stop there. Now you can have agents which can do automated follow-ups with your stakeholders. So let's say there is a price exception where the price doesn't match what's on the purchase order. Now traditionally the way you would handle this is somebody from your AP team has to follow up with the respective stakeholder and try to figure out, hey, why there's an exception. In this case, an agent can do that for you. And to certain extent you can take the agent to the next level where it can now reach out to your supplier and ask that question, understand what is responded back and then take the appropriate action. So instead of creating multiple rules and all, let AI handle all that and you don't have to worry about day-to-day kind of invoice processing. Now all this you can set it up in ProcureDesk today. So if you are interested in seeing how AI automation can help you with AP processing, click on the link below and talk to one of our product specialists. So that is number one, OCR and intelligent invoice capture. Now we can also extend this to what we call electronic invoicing. So instead of receiving PDF images and so on, you can have an electronic invoice coming into a system like ProcureDesk where it automatically gets matched. There's completely no-touch process and that way you are not even bothered about managing the invoices that are coming in. It's all done by the system. Number 2 is intelligent classification of cost center coding. So traditionally here is the process, right? AP gets the invoice, they try to code the invoice to the right chart of account or right class, project, whatever the case might be. And the reality is they generally don't know what is the purpose of that, right? So for example, you bought material for a project that needs to be charged back to the customer, might go into a different project or case like that. Or maybe sometimes, you know, you're buying materials for internal research versus selling it to customers. They need to be coded differently. There are different tax implications and so on. And it is very hard for AP to figure all that out, especially when your volume is increasing. So you do need knowledge of chart of accounts and how the company works, and which is fine if you have a knowledgeable AP team, but tomorrow if they leave, who's going to do that? Or how are you going to do the knowledge transfer? So with AI, all this can be automated. So now imagine a tool that looks at your last 6 to 9 months of invoice history. It understands how the classification is done. For example, if a service or material was purchased for this location or this department, it was coded in this way or alternate and so on. So it has all the possible variations. And now when the invoice comes in, it can leverage its past knowledge to automatically code the invoice into the respective chart of account, department, class, or anything like that. And I'm not talking about simple rules like, you know, if this, then that. I'm talking about an intelligent system that learns from the past history and it is continuously evolving based on as and when you see new data. So for example, if it hasn't seen any product or service in the past, now it can and then automatically classify that. So that is intelligent coding. The benefit of this is AP doesn't have to spend time, or if you're a controller, you're not spending time trying to reclassify and code that data or invoices again. It is done right the first time and you can spend your time analyzing the spend patterns rather than trying to code different invoices. So that's number 2. Number 3 is guided buying for purchasing. So traditionally, as your organization is kind of increasing, your purchasing volume is going up, a common problem or challenge is that you have to keep routing your employees to the right preferred vendors. So what do I mean by that? Let's say you go to Staples and say, hey, you know what, I will buy all my office supplies from you if you give me 10% discount. Staples says, great, here's the catalog. But how do you make sure that all the employees know about it, right? You can put it in a system, but how do you enforce that compliance so that they go to Staples every time they need to buy office supplies? And that is what's called guided buying. And in the past, the way companies have tried to achieve that is building rules, right? So if you see this category, then do this. And the problem with that approach is it doesn't scale because every time something changes, you got to go change your rules. It just makes it super hard to maintain a system that actually can work for guided buying. To purchase. Now with AI, this problem is solved, and here's a couple of reasons why. First of all, if you're using any tool like ChatGPT or, you know, Claude or so on, the tools can easily understand your context. What are you trying to purchase, right? So if you say, for example, I'm trying to buy a laptop, it could probably ask and say, what kind of laptop are you buying, right? Is it a MacBook or a Windows? You know, what kind of RAM do you need, and so on, right? So the tools are intelligent to understand the context. Now combine that with a compliance engine that can take that context and automatically route it to the right vendor. And for that matter, it can go one step above, right? And it can actually show you the preferred items that are available from that supplier that matches your context. So imagine a chatbot where you basically say, hey, I'm looking for laptop, and it says, okay, great, Sachin Sharma, you are from finance department, and here is the preferred laptop. You go ahead and click on and say, yep, look, go ahead and buy it. And it knows that it needs approval. So you don't even need to kind of configure approval workflows. It can actually figure out the compliance requirement based on your delegation of authority and then gets routed to the right person. Right person approves it, and you get a notification that your laptop has been ordered. It's as simple as that. So the benefits of using AI here is you're not continuously training your employees on where to buy or what to buy from where. The system kind of understands the context and then guides them to the right supplier, right item, and so on. And it helps you save money because if you have already negotiated a better contract or price savings and so on, you can avail that. But also from standpoint. Compliance is taken care of, your audit is taken care of, and so on. So that's number 3, guided buying. All right, let's talk about number 4 now, insights for approvers. So a typical process when it comes to spend management is you have some sort of approval process where you need to get approval for things that you're buying. Let's say you need to buy some supplies or whatever the case might be, you need to route it to a manager for approval and so on. The manager gets it, but they are looking for what you're looking to purchase, but they have no context around the purchase, whether it is how do I have Do I have the right budget for it? Have you already checked whether the budget is available or not? When was the last time this person purchased it? Have you ever done this purchase in the past? Or why do I need this again for this project? We bought this 6 months back or 3 months back and so on. Or maybe it's, you know, back to school time and everybody is buying office supplies to take it home, right? Whatever the case is, I'm not suggesting people do it, but you know, I've seen that happening. So where AI can help in insights is now imagine you're an approver and a request comes to you for approval and has full context. Hey, John is requesting Supplies for this project. This project has been going on for 3 months. We typically buy this every month, so seems normal. And by the way, I have already checked that the project has budget and budget is under track, right? So how easy it is for the approvers to quickly approve and approve with confidence, right? So rather than doing their own homework trying to figure out whether they should approve or just rubber stamp it, now you can look at an analysis that is presented to you and make a decision, right? So that's number 4 insight for approvers. All right, and now we come to number 5 and my favorite, Conversational interfaces in procurement and AP. So what I mean by conversational interface, a traditional rollout of a system includes training your employees on how to use the system, right? So if you need to create a PO or need upload an invoice, you gotta go to this screen, press this button. And by the way, if you need to do XYZ, which is a little bit more complex, you need to click, click, click these 3 screens, 4 screens. You have a new employee joining, now they have to go through the same training and people forget, right? If I don't use the system for 3 months for whatever reason, now I need to be trained again. And that is a problem with the traditional interfaces that we have or what we are used to as of today. But with AI, you can take it to a next level where interface is not mandatory. It's optional. So what do I mean by that? Imagine you are in the system and you're looking to find the status of an invoice, for example. So traditionally what you would do is you will log in, you You will go to the invoice screen, you gotta go a little bit of filtering, search, try to figure out the invoice, and then you'll click on it. Then you'll see whether it's paid or not, check payment status, how it was paid, when it was paid, and so on, right? You're probably 5 to 6 clicks, you know, done, 5 minutes, 10 minutes to find the information. Contrast to that, now you go to the system and say, show me what has been done for this invoice from supplier. And it says, hey, here are the last 3 invoices I received from this vendor, which one it is? Oh, it's the first one. All right, great. Here's the invoice, here's when it was processed. It says so so exceptions. It was approved by so-and-so. By the way, it's now paid. Here's when the vendor was paid. Here's the check number. You see how easy it is? And that is where the promise of conversational interfaces in the systems now. And that's where we are aggressively working in ProcureDesk to kind of implement all this across the board, whether it is guided buying or whether it is, you know, in the AP process for you to kind of manage invoices. And the biggest benefit of this shift is training is optional, right? So you can, rather than every vendor claiming that they have the easy-to-use interface and you don't need training and all, this can actually take you to a place where training is optional. You can do it, just converse or have a chat with the system and the system does the rest. So if you're ready to see how AI-powered procurement and AP system can help your team automate the processes and save hours and hours every week, click on the link below and schedule some time to talk to one of our product specialists. And once you schedule your call, we'll analyze your current situation, we'll understand the current processes and walk you through how you can use AI in automating most of those processes today. If you want to To see how to speed up your month-end close process, check this video.