The seven most valuable AI use cases in AP and finance

Seven AI use cases for P2P and finance teams

1. Continuous transaction risk controls

Duplicates, split invoices and suspicious patterns get caught as they hit your ERP, long before the payment run. You see the risks, not the thousands of clean invoices around them.

Software: Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust achieved over 1,000% ROI preventing duplicate payments. London & Quadrant cut double payments by 96%. Hackett has AP at 33% scaling AI, the highest of any finance process.

2. Supplier file and supplier risk monitoring

Fraudsters need a supplier record to get paid, so the supplier file is a sensible place to look first.

The stakes are clear in AFP’s 2024 survey: 79% of organisations were hit by payment fraud attempts, and only 22% recovered 75% or more of their losses.

Across the FISCAL dataset, the median supplier file has 52% active suppliers flagged as dormant. A quarter sit below 24%, and a quarter above 71%. (That count leaves out one-time suppliers, which haven’t had time to go dormant.) Dormant records are the ones nobody is watching.

FISCAL’s supplier risk intelligence software uses AI to flag dormant and duplicate suppliers and incorrect supplier data, and checks suppliers against employee records, credit, sanctions and adverse media data. This allows your team to review suppliers who need to be updated or archived, or might be a fraud risk.

Bank-detail change verification and employee-to-supplier cross-referencing are two checks a team could build itself. 

3. Continuous supplier statement reconciliation

In our experience, many teams only reconcile their top 10 or 20 suppliers by hand. According to our data, 1 in 8 statement lines disagree with your ledger. Agentic AI can request statements, gather data, reconcile, act on the differences and watch the inbox for replies. It puts thousands of statements a month within reach.

With a combination of streamlining its accounting workflows and automating statement reconciliation, some finance teams have been able to halve their close from 8 days to 4 in just one month. APQC puts the typical close at between 6 and 10 days, with top performers at five or fewer.

McCarthy Stone identified £640k in missed credits in 12 months across two accounting systems and three business units with the FISCAL’s AI software. Overall, FISCAL finds that customers increase their reconciliation speed by at least 12 times.

4. Supplier communication and email triage

Chasing suppliers, sorting their emails and sending templated replies is underrated work, and it takes a lot of time. Ardent Partners Accounts Payable Metrics that Matter in 2025, says AP staff spend 21.8% of their time managing supplier inquiries. They suggest that best in class teams spend 50% less time on inquiries. While They do not specify how this can be achieved, it is potentially due to automation in their processes and communications.

Zapier, where around 98% of employees use AI, built a tax-notice workflow. It classifies and summarises each notice, then routes it to Slack, saving hours every week.

AP software is available that can triage supplier communications and create replies. FISCAL’s software handles communications under your team’s guardrails. When an email arrives, it classifies and matches to the supplier. It pulls in invoices, status and payment details and drafts a reply. A person reads it, approves it and sends it, or this can be automated.

5. Report generation, analysis and forecasting

Reports can be automated on a schedule that suits you. Questions can be answered in the meeting by walking through your ledger. Variance commentary is drafted for you, and board packs that bring reporting, forecasting and commentary together.

A general-purpose AI assistant pointed at a clean data extract takes you a long way. Microsoft use Copilot, which saves 20 minutes per account on AR reconciliation, and one FP&A team cut its weekly reconciliation from between 1 and 2 hours to 10 minutes.

Another option: FISCAL’s AI report generator builds reports from your P2P data, and AI connectivity lets you query FISCAL data from your own AI tools. Connectors are powerful – you can use AI to create incredibly bespoke reports of your own that links sets of data.

6. Contract review and technical accounting

At OpenAI, the Contract Reader Bot extracts terms, applies ASC 606 and IFRS 15 logic and generates journal entries. The team runs at roughly 22% of the headcount of comparable tech firms. It’s a sophisticated build, and few finance teams have OpenAI’s engineers on tap. Most in-house versions will be simpler.

7. Meeting notes and actions

At a basic level, AI is very good at meeting notes, and at turning them into actions and plans. A notetaker keeps you present in the room, and a quick workflow can turn the notes into a task list soon after the call. Your meeting software may already offer notetaking or AI summaries, saving you some time.