New Stampli procure-to-pay touts “conversation-first” approach

AP-focused financial automation platform Stampli released an AI-driven procure-to-pay solution that works through dynamic conversations with the system itself. 

Stampli Procure-to-Pay, which uses the company’s AI assistant Billy the Bot, has the ability to turn plain conversational text into structured purchase orders and financial documents, replacing rote data entry. Stampli observed that procurement often involves dynamic conversations between multiple stakeholders, such as finance teams, employees and vendors. These conversations, though, tend to take place on separate channels, emails and chat tools versus the procurement platform itself, which breaks the audit trail. 

The conversation-first approach, on the other hand, allows the software to capture and contextualize all procurement discussions within each transaction’s workflow. It can support an existing intake process, approval workflow or business requirement. The system uses AI-powered approval flows guided by historical patterns. It automatically suggests preferred items and vendors based on an analysis of purchasing patterns. The program generates formatted purchase orders directly within customers’ ERP systems. 

“Only Stampli unifies all procurement processes, documents and discussion into a single intelligent workflow,” said Stampli CEO and co-founder Eyal Feldman. “Everything happens within Stampli: every step, every approval, every budget review, and every conversation, in perfect harmony with your ERP.”

For example, according to the CEO in a later email, a user could describe their office supply needs in plain language. Billy the Bot analyzes the text and extracts the item names, quantity and context, then maps them to stock-keeping units, descriptions and costs. This process requires no special training and is designed to encourage employees to use the system and not try to bypass or ignore it, which creates challenges in terms of compliance as well as workflow efficiency. 

Stampli said its new solution can be implemented within weeks. Once deployed, it will adapt to existing processes, reducing the amount of necessary change management. 

The announcement comes a few months after the release of another AI-powered solution, Stampli Cognitive AI, which the company said features “human-level” purchase order matching. Using large language models combined with nearly a decade’s worth of data on invoice-processing workflows, the model is said to understand the nuanced context of financial operations and replicate human decision-making processes.