AI – a trendy makeup or a real tool for real benefits?

Throughout history, big technology shifts have shaped societies, leaving their marks on the business world as well. While some have what it takes to predict the next steps of development and achieve genuine leadership, most of us perceive and understand everything in hindsight.But when it comes to positioning a service provider in the market, everyone is an expert.

TEXT: TIMO MANSIKKA-AHO

But when it comes to positioning a service provider in the market, everyone is an expert.

“Companies that fail to take into account all aspects that contribute to a technology shift in their respective field inevitably lose their competitive edge to those who can make the most of futureproof decisions without losing their focus on today’s precision”, says Anders Fohlin, CFO at Medius, a company specializing in AI-powered AP automation and full-suite Source-to-Pay (S2P) software development. “Just think about cell phones and cloud services – there are companies who managed to make a huge shift in competence as things evolved, while others had to settle for a branding exercise.”

Fohlin refers to companies who merely moved their servers into cloud and started calling themselves cloud experts. Compared to those who thoroughly shifted their operations to multitenant SaaS-based services and began developing them on open platforms, the difference in customer experience was downright remarkable.

Now, the same trend is clearly visible in the AI market.

An enhanced chat function or a genuine time and money saver?

According to Fohlin, while there are companies who actually do the technology shift, many of the companies who now call themselves AI specialists settle for a layer of decoration to back up their sales pitch. With ChatGPT bringing text-based machine learning at everyone’s disposal, somewhat intelligent solutions that include a conversational part and provide more accurate answers than a chatbot or a human being, are in relative terms more straightforward to come up with.

Then, there are companies such as Medius who have access to a massive amount of data in a certain field and who build their AI learning based on that expertise. This metadata is not only text-based but based on any type of information. Thus, the same way domain-specific data for example trains biochemists to identify new medicines quicker, it helps Medius to provide groundbreaking solutions in the framework of Accounts Payable and S2P.

This approach has helped Medius to include sophisticated functions to its AP service. While the automatic recognition of country-specific e-invoice formats makes handling international invoices a lot smoother, AI-based fraud detection recognizes deviations in address, bank account and other data manipulation that are impossible for human eye to spot, especially when dealing with a massive number of invoices, and alert the users automatically to anomalies.

Anders Fohlin points out that especially now as AI is still making its way to various functions in an organization, the choice of service provider is by no means an insignificant one.

“Choosing a company to provide a system solution is a substantial investment that involves deployment, training, and organizational commitment. The moment when it becomes really expensive is the moment when you, down the line, realize the chosen supplier turns out to not be AI future-proof after all, and you have to start terminating the contract and selecting a new candidate.” |

Read more at medius.com