Today, Basware announced that it will be making several additions to the Invoice Lifecycle Management Platform that forms the basis of what the company offers its customers. AI naturally plays an important role in this. However, the company also revealed that it is moving towards an autonomous Accounts Payable solution and world.
A few months ago, we wrote about the addition of InvoiceAI to Basware’s platform. This includes two AI Agents: the AP Business Agent and the AP Data Agent. The AP Business Agent provides real-time contextual assistance on what actions and next steps employees can take when processing invoices. This should streamline things.
The AP Data Agent should enable employees to ask questions and give commands in normal everyday language. This could include showing all invoices for a specific region or all invoices from customers who have paid quickly or late.
From automation to autonomy
In this way, automation should slowly but surely become autonomy. The company is obviously not there yet, but the AI Agents announced by Basware can already autonomously tackle and handle parts of the process. That should already show results. Especially in departments that deal with invoices a lot, there are a huge number of boring, repetitive tasks that mainly take time but do not necessarily require unique qualities that people can add to a process. In that case, these types of agents are definitely useful.
However, these two agents are not enough for Basware’s customers, or for Basware. That is why the company has announced that more AI Agents will be arriving soon. The idea is that these will go beyond simply producing a few insights quickly, as the first two agents did. This will also be necessary if Basware really wants to move towards autonomy. Think of setting priorities, automating processing, and generally creating more links between different systems. All this should ensure that decisions can be made even faster and smarter, regardless of the scale at which this needs to be done.
More autonomous agents
To move towards greater autonomy, Basware has the following AI Agents in the pipeline: Supplier Agent and AP Pro Agent. The Supplier Agent is designed to resolve any disputes surrounding invoices. The agent calls the supplier who sent the invoice and explains the dispute. The agent then produces a summary of the conversation and suggests next steps.
The AP Pro Agent on Basware’s roadmap is designed to better support AP staff who have questions about invoice processing. This agent does this in real time using interactions in normal everyday language.
Building trust
Basware cannot rush into AI, especially when it comes to (semi-)autonomous agents. After all, Accounts Payable is a fairly crucial part of an organization. You don’t just let a bunch of agents loose in the hope that everything will turn out fine. An organization should never do that, but especially not there.
To bridge the gap that undoubtedly exists for organizations in the use of AI agents at the core of their infrastructure, there must be trust. That is why Basware emphasizes that AI is not just attached to the platform, but that it is an integral part of it. Basware CEO Jason Kurtz promises that Basware will continue to use it “intelligently, safely, and ethically.”
“Autonomy without trust is just risk,” Kurtz continues. All AI decisions will therefore be and remain explainable. This also means that they can withstand audits. In addition, the AI Agents can fall under the governance that organizations already use.
If Basware succeeds in gaining (and maintaining, of course) this trust on a larger scale, the agentic additions to the Invoice Lifecycle Management Platform could yield significant benefits for AP teams. It is clear that Basware has no intention of changing course. The relatively deep integration of AI into the platform that Basware advocates could also ensure that adoption proceeds fairly quickly. This is especially true if customers really benefit from it and Basware does not charge a premium for it.