We are delighted to feature this guest post about harnessing artificial intelligence in invoicing from Raphael Bres, Chief Product Officer at Tradeshift.

From the fiction of ‘WOPR’ in the 1980s film “War Games”to the terrifyingly real almost-apocalypse of 1983’s Soviet nuclear false alarm incident, humanity has plenty of reasons to be fearful of the consequences of putting computers in charge. Perhaps that explains our wariness of ceding control to artificial intelligence (AI) in a host of much more run-of-the-mill processes.

But this reluctance to hand over the keys — of a self-driving car, a business or even missile silo — betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI is designed to work. Too often AI is presented as it is in dystopian fiction, as an overlord, when it’s actually more like a workhorse, and a highly effective one.

Change your mindset, forget about relinquishing complete control, and you’ll soon discover that AI can give you a competitive advantage in areas of your business you barely gave a moment’s thought to before, like the sometimes unglamorous world of invoice processing.

The cost of doing business

One might be forgiven for not getting overly excited about the intricacies of invoicing, but that’s precisely the point. Processing invoices is a time-consuming and repetitive task. It’s also notoriously prone to mistakes and human error that require manual review and reprocessing for reasons ranging from a mismatch between invoice and purchase order (PO), to errors with invoice coding. Accounts Payable (AP) teams currently spend around a quarter of their time chasing and correcting errors. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool data entry clerk will tell you there are more valuable things they could be doing with their time.

The bottlenecks these heavily manual processes create can also lead to problems further down the line. Experts estimate that it costs an average of $11 to and takes eight days to process every invoice. Not only is that a major cost-center for large businesses, it can become a major source of friction with suppliers when processing delays translate into late payments.

Many enterprises might see this as the unavoidable cost of doing business — others, however, might dream of automating the process entirely. Neither approach is right. Businesses need to find the perfect balance between human and machine, ensuring that each complements the other so automation doesn’t come at the expense of accuracy.

Keep control of artificial intelligence

It’s often said you should always aim to employ people smarter than yourself — but that doesn’t mean making them managing director on their first day. It’s the same with artificial intelligence. The technology is fiendishly clever, but it’s like someone with a raw talent: It needs to be nurtured before it can be let loose on something sensitive like invoice processing.

So start small and hold its hand while you teach the technology how to recognize common errors. A perfect “robotic” task for AI is performing line matching between invoice and purchase order, or entering the right coding. These are easy ones to teach because you’ll have plenty of “good” examples from which the AI can learn. For the first month or two, you’ll need a human operative sitting by and reviewing to ensure that the AI is getting things right. But after three months with zero errors, the technology can clearly be trusted to do that task.

Of course, all this is predicated on having zero tolerance for errors. But many businesses may prefer to trust their AI a little more and to use its initiative — for want of a better word — within carefully calibrated parameters. Unfortunately, almost every AI for accounts payable is a case of “on or off,” but that’s changing. The latest technologies enable operatives to set different tolerances, so you can decide whether the AI operates conservatively — always querying and flagging items it’s unsure of — or given relatively free rein, or somewhere in between.

If you are looking for technology to help your P2P process run more smoothly, Spend Matters’ new 5-step “Procurement Technology Buyer’s Guide” can help.

An employee like no other

The key with AI is to remain in control. Treat the technology like any other worker: Give it clearly-defined tasks that are within its capabilities, and make sure that the consequences of any mistake aren’t catastrophic. Follow this simple approach, and you’ll start to unlock a huge range of benefits. Automation can lower the average cost to process an invoice by 80% and in some cases we’ve seen AI reduce manual interventions by as much as 99.5%.

But the benefits don’t stop there. Automation enables businesses to reimagine long-ingrained yet inefficient business processes. In fact, using context and clues gathered from historical data, it’s quite possible we could soon do away with the approvals process entirely on certain recurring or low-value transactions from a trusted vendor. It’s also a powerful weapon against fraud, able to analyze vast quantities of data from breaches around the world and identify instances that would normally not be found by the human eye, to avert them in the future. And it can have a direct impact on cash flow by helping to identify and reward the partners who pay early.

These are just some of the tactical benefits that properly harnessed AI can bring. Its greatest value, though, is to free up workers to focus on more valuable, skillful and enjoyable work. The lesson is clear: When it comes to AI, show it who’s boss. It’s the one employee with an insatiable appetite for whatever work and mass data you throw at it.

The post Accounts Payable — How to show artificial intelligence who’s boss appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

Here are 7 ways to earn a living with artificial intelligence, without working for a company.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most revolutionary technologies of our time and you can make money out of it. Every industry in today’s time is powered by AI as businesses are using it as a competitive tool. From chatbots for efficient customer service to using it for analytics to make predictive recommendations, artificial intelligence is leading the world forward. That makes AI an unmissable technology.

If you are in the IT industry, you must be habituated to use programming languages, work with different frameworks, build software for companies, and write various codes to escalate problems. But don’t disregard AI as an integral part of the IT field. AI and its many applications can help you earn a living and stay updated with modern tech trends. Here’s how.

1. Become an AI entrepreneur

It takes a problem-solver to become a business leader. There are so many things around us that need better solutions like global warming, excessive workloads, faster deliveries, improved emergency healthcare, etc. Basically, there’s always something to improve around us. So figure out a pain point you want to target, get a team to brainstorm ideas, define the target audience, plan a solution, pitch the idea to investors, and get going with your own AI startup and make this world a better place while earning profits.

2. Improve machine learning application in eCommerce

For good or bad, the COVID-19 pandemic has replaced the habit of shopping at physical stores with shopping online for almost everything. Because eCommerce shopping is in demand, this is the time to use machine learning and keep enhancing the experience. You can build a better recommendation engine, personalize the service, predict supply and demand faster, build improved visual search, and build a better security system. You can also create conversational interfaces and automate customer service tasks.

3. Get competitive with chatbots

Every eCommerce website has a chatbot that will pop up as soon as you open the webpage. This is because companies are tapping into the potential of chatbots to provide 24/7 customer service. That doesn’t mean you can’t contribute to this buzz. Chatbot as a virtual assistant is the next development. Because AI is the technology that allows chatbots to mimic a human while conversing, you can teach the system how to talk using NLP. There are pre-made platforms like Microsoft Bot Framework, Botkit, and Dialogflow that will make this easier.

4. Leverage your business with AI

If you run a business, you can make it more efficient with AI. You can use data from your customers and target their social media feeds to show useful products that your business offers, or make applications that will lighten your employee’s workflow. If your business has an app, there are several ways to improve it using AI. For example, you could use speech synthesis to make your app convenient for people with weak vision.

5. The trend of blogs never died

No, blogging is not dead, it just has different forms now like video blogging and audio blogging. If you are good at understanding and explaining complex tech concepts, you can start a blog to tutor budding engineers and developers. First, identify what you are good at. Then, start writing blogs on your own website or make vlogs or start a podcast. You can also create and sell online courses and even write a book. If you want to teach, there are many possibilities.

6. Develop your own app

If starting a business of your own seems like a daunting task that will bog down your mental health, solve the same pain point by developing an app. Almost every service-related app uses artificial intelligence. You can make a simple app powered by AI and monetize it by adding a premium subscription or selling ad space on it.

7. Compete and win

There are many machine learning competitions that allow programmers to earn money. Kaggle is a popular ML platform that offers prize money to winners, and Numerai is a tournament where data science professionals can compete to predict asset prices. Many other machine learning competitions allow programmers to practice before competing.

The post BE YOUR OWN BOSS & MAKE MONEY WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.