Medius Debuts AI-Powered Accounts Payable Tools

Accounts payable (AP) management firm Medius has introduced a pair of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered offerings.

Medius Copilot is an AI assistant embedded within the company’s AP automation application, designed to assist invoice approvers, especially those who are not AP experts, according to a Thursday (June 27) press release.

“Medius Copilot enables users to ask questions about invoices, facilitating quick, efficient, and anomaly-free approvals,” the company said in the release.

This reduces the time needed to chase queries and while minimizing the risk of delayed approvals, the release added.

Meanwhile, Medius Supplier Conversations is aimed at reducing the time companies spend responding to supplier inquiries, something a majority of financial professionals say comes with their job, the company added.

“While these inquiries are general emails from suppliers looking to be paid, this randomized deluge of communications is a burden on finance teams that should be focused on making accurate payments and closing out the month,” the release said. “These teams are forced to choose between risking supplier satisfaction and making on-time payments, and they have an overwhelming load of tasks to keep businesses on track.”

The solution, Medius said, automatically handles questions from suppliers, providing instant and accurate responses through email based on supplier history, payment terms and trading information.

PYMNTS examined the role AI is playing in the accounts payable field earlier this year in a conversation with Krishna Janakiraman, head of engineering at Ottimate.

“With deep learning and advancements in computer vision, AP tasks are very automatable compared to where they were 10 years back — it has made a huge difference,” Janakiraman told PYMNTS in April.

According to Janakiraman, recent developments in deep learning and computer vision have revolutionized invoice processing, making it more automatable than before. Tasks like extracting structured data from images have become streamlined, reducing manual efforts and speeding processing times.

“If you look at the whole AP automation workflow, it starts from processing invoices or documents such as statements and purchase orders, and then you are coding those documents to accounting dimensions, and ultimately approving those documents for paying,” Janakiraman said.

PYMNTS wrote last week about AI’s impact on the AP space and larger B2B space, noting that any future innovations will also need to balance security with data sharing.

“Companies and enterprises are increasingly facing a dilemma between how much they want to leverage their data versus how much they want to keep it secure and protected,” Sadegh Riazi, CEO and founder at Pyte, told PYMNTS during a discussion for the “AI Effect” series.

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