Identifying the Business Benefits of SAP Business AI

The growing interest in leveraging AI to optimize finance processes is not surprising, as business expectations are growing and finance teams face unprecedented challenges. The number of business transactions is increasing, and the „Great Retirement" has exacerbated the talent shortage, forcing financial teams to struggle just to keep the lights on. Not enough time is left to help provide financial guidance and steer the business toward products, services, customers, and partners that will bring long-term, sustainable success.

Only the widespread adoption of AI across finance business processes, prompt access to trusted, always up-to-date predictions, and proactive controls can help finance organizations cope with growing workloads and find time for strategic activities that can steer the business to success.

Get to know the key areas where AI are revolutionizing the finance sector. From user interaction and document processing to data analytics, predictions, and detections, these cutting-edge technologies are transforming the way businesses operate, enabling them to streamline processes, enhance decision-making, and uncover valuable insights from vast amounts of data.

Natural Language based system interaction, summarization of complex business information, automatic generation of textual reports such as financial statements, explanation of complex accounting rules like depreciation rules.

AI-based document processing and data extraction for a large sets of financial documents such as invoices, goods receipts, payment advices, lease contracts and others.

Automatic reconciliation of data sets e.g. payments and open invoices, goods receipts and invoice receipts.

Automated data collection and preparation, cleaning, inconsistency repair, suggestion of cleaning methods.

Improving prediction models, handle complex data sets, improve accuracy and robustness such as predicting late payment, predicting liquidity and cash flow.

Pattern detection in large sets of data, hidden correlations, outliers and anomalies like fraudulent payments, identification of critical business interactions with sanctioned countries.

Digitalization already flows through the business world. But AI can ensure that finance rides the next wave of digital innovation. Investing in AI has become essential for finance departments that want to avoid falling behind in achieving the next level of digitalization. Yet, to maximize ROI, AI investments must advance CFOs’ business priorities, enabling finance teams to become more productive and proactive while reducing compliance risks.

Leveraging AI in finance processes dramatically increases the productivity of finance teams. Contrary to rule-driven automation, whose effects degrade over time, AI models continuously learn from the context in which they operate.

When business processes embed AI capabilities, algorithms can recognize changing business patterns, learn from human exception handling, and recommend retraining when performance can improve.

With AI enabling analysts to predict and model complex business scenarios in real-time, finance teams have become more proactive and strategic.

This makes it possible to set up proactive risk and exposure alerts, promptly identify and react to changes in customer sentiment, anticipate supply chain disruption and prepare for the impact of upcoming regulations.

Proactively enforcing finance processes’ compliance with industry, government, and tax regulations lowers business risks and liabilities. For example, AI can ensure that the information used to create journal entries is accurate, detect errors in financial transactions, and automatically propose remedies based on past successful interventions.

SAP is uniquely positioned to help companies strategically adopt AI across the enterprise. With AI-powered insights, recommendations, and automation built into SAP applications and pre-trained AI models to address specific functional needs, organizations can transform every aspect of their end-to-end business processes faster and with less risk.

Also, accounts payable and receivable professionals can use powerful predictive analytics models to devise payment and collection strategies, while AI-powered business integrity screening and access governance enhance security and compliance.

Compliance with statutory regulations and reporting accuracy are top of mind for our customers. With SAP AI-powered governance, compliance, and risk management solutions, finance departments can identify and respond to risks as they arise. For example, by applying AI and behavioral analytics to large volumes of historical and real-time transactions, managers can identify potentially illegitimate transactions and errors that could lead to financial liability.

Similarly, finance departments can use AI to streamline governance and help prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data and applications. AI empowers administrators to grant access rights that consider a broader set of parameters, such as business processes, job functions, existing access privileges, and company policies. The result is an optimal access granularity that improves user productivity and mitigates compliance risks. Reporting accuracy is also paramount for any

finance organization. SAP AI-powered solutions help improve accuracy across finance business processes. For example, in the record-to-report business process, it is possible to automate the posting of new journal entries to avoid manual errors – a critical step for improving reporting accuracy and compliance.

SAP customers have countless opportunities to leverage AI for optimizing finance business processes. SAP applications come with embedded AI capabilities that work seamlessly with other SAP BTP advanced technologies to maximize business impact and lower implementation risk.

For example, to streamline the invoice-to-cash process, SAP S/4HANA customers seamlessly leverage optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract key information from payment advice notes while AI models match it with open receivables. Under the hood, RPA technology loads the information extracted from the digital documents into SAP S/4HANA and routes matching exceptions to accountants for clearing. Freed from tedious tasks, account receivables teams can focus on more strategic activities.

Similar ready-to-use information extraction capabilities, automated workflows, and pre-trained AI models are available to improve efficiency across all finance processes – from automatically processing account payable documents in the invoice-to-pay process to reconciling goods-receipts with invoice-receipts in both invoice-to-pay and record-to-report processes.

Intelligent predictions also accelerate financial closure. For example, the AI models for goods-receipts to invoice-receipts reconciliation help accountants identify the root cause of discrepancies encountered during the matching process, saving valuable time in the record-to-report process – especially in complex intercompany reconciliations.