Problems we solve
Six operational problems account for most of the manual cost in a mid-sized organization. Choose yours. Each one shows the benchmark, what has to change, what we build and how it is measured.
Documents
The document arrives as a PDF or an email attachment. Someone reads it, keys it into the system, chases the missing field, routes it for approval and files it. The per-item cost looks small. The exception handling is where the money goes.
Invoices and intake
$10.89
vs $2.78
Cost to process one invoice: average organization vs top performers. Top performers post in 3.1 days instead of 10.9 and see 9% exceptions instead of 22%.17
At 50,000 invoices a year the gap is about $400,000, before counting early-payment discounts missed and the seven extra days of float.
What has to change
Clean documents should post without a person touching them. People should see only the exceptions, with the reason the record failed and the fix already proposed. That means validating every extracted field against your master data before anything is written, not after.
What we build
Invoices, claims, contracts and forms read, checked against vendor, item and contract records, and routed for approval under your existing rules. Exceptions go to a person with the mismatch highlighted. Clean records post straight through to the system of record.
Measured by cost per document, exception rate, days to post, early-payment discounts captured.
Seen in practice
A model reads each submission and drafts a priced quote; an underwriter reviews before it goes out. About two-thirds of the book now runs this way. Company-reported, 2024 to 2025.
Reporting and close
Half of finance teams take six or more business days to close. The time goes into pulling balances from several systems, reconciling them in spreadsheets, writing variance commentary and re-checking figures that moved after they were copied.
Reporting and close
50%
take 6+ business days
Share of finance teams whose month-end close runs six or more business days. 27% regularly take more than seven.18
Every extra day is a day leadership runs on last month's numbers, and a week of senior finance time spent assembling rather than analyzing.
What has to change
The controller, not the project team, defines the baseline: days to close, hours per report, corrections after release. Finance validates the result. Hours released are capacity until finance says what they were redeployed to.
What we build
Close packages, reconciliations, variance commentary and management reports assembled from the ledger and source systems, with every figure traceable to its origin and every judgment call flagged for review before release.
Measured by days to close, hours per report, corrections after release, reconciling items open at close.
Seen in practice
About 20% of invoices came by email outside EDI and were never checked. An agent now structures them and flags mismatches to a dashboard. Savings are projected, not yet realized. Vendor-reported, 2024.
Connecting systems
Every organization has a process that crosses two systems that do not talk: CRM to ERP, HR to IT, ticketing to billing. The bridge is a person who copies fields from one screen to another. It is slow, it is error-prone and nobody owns it.
Rekeying between systems
1 to 3%
of fields
Error rate for trained staff entering data by hand, measured per field in a controlled study.19
On a 40-field record that is an error in roughly half of all records, each one found downstream by a customer, an auditor or a colleague who has to chase it.
What has to change
Nearly 75% of AI high performers fundamentally redesigned workflows; about 25% of everyone else did. The design covers the trigger, the approvals, the exceptions, the completion and the write-back into the system of record. No step stays in someone's inbox.
What we build
Governed write-back between CRM, ERP, HR and ticketing systems through their supported interfaces. Records are validated before they move. One record, no rekeying, and every change attributable to a named identity.
Measured by cycle time, rekeying errors, touches per case, records reconciled between systems.
Seen in practice
The hiring workflow kept its Oracle HR systems and gained an orchestration layer. 60% lower transfer cost and up to 70% better process accuracy were reported by the company.
Customer and internal support
Most tier-1 questions are lookups against systems you already own: order status, policy wording, password resets, benefits eligibility. When each one reaches a person, the cost per contact is a multiple of what self-service costs, and the answer is no better.
Support and service desks
$13.50
vs $1.84
Median cost per contact on assisted channels (phone, chat, email) vs self-service.20
At 200,000 assisted contacts a year, moving a third to resolved self-service is worth roughly $780,000 before any change in satisfaction.
What has to change
Generic training does not change the job. An assistant has to be built and tested on your actual tickets, your knowledge base and your systems of record, and it has to hand off to a person with the full history attached rather than starting the conversation over.
What we build
Assistants that resolve tier-1 requests from your knowledge base and your systems of record, inside the channels you already run, and escalate the rest with the history attached. Low-confidence answers route to people automatically.
Measured by cost per contact, resolution rate, time to resolve, escalation rate, repeat contacts.
Seen in practice
A three-month trial answered routine email end to end and routed vulnerable customers and complaints to people. Klarna's 2024 to 2025 experience, on the same page, shows why the measuring never stops.
Agents and pilots
The demo is convincing. Then it meets permissions, exceptions, cost per run and the question of who is accountable when the agent acts. One in five organizations say operating costs already constrain their use of AI.
Pilots and agents
~75%
vs ~25%
Share of AI high performers who fundamentally redesigned workflows, against everyone else. Association, not causation.2
Pilots that stall share a pattern: no owner, no baseline, no defined boundary for what the system may do on its own.
What has to change
Each agent gets its own identity, the minimum access the workflow needs, an approval gate on high-impact actions, tests that cover the failure modes and a cost per completed case that is tracked from day one. The pilot is built as the first production release, not a throwaway.
What we build
Agents that execute multi-step work across your systems under least-privilege identities, with human approval where you already require it, full logging and a rollback path. They do the work. Your people keep the authority.
Measured by cost per completed case, authorized-action rate, review time per case, rollback events.
Seen in practice
With client consent it drafts meeting notes, surfaces actions and writes the record into the CRM. 98% of advisor teams use it. Adoption only; no savings figure published.
Governance and adoption
In a 1,250-person survey, 66% said they had used AI at work against policy and 34% had entered customer data into public tools. Blocking does not work. An approved path that is also the easiest path does.
Shadow AI
66%
/ 34%
Reported policy-defying AI use / customer data entered into public AI tools.5
Every unmanaged tool is an unlogged data flow. The first incident is usually found by a customer or a regulator, not by IT.
What has to change
Inventory what is actually in use. Approve tools people will use. Set data rules by classification, assign approvers with real authority, and train by role on real tasks. 81% of CIOs expect skills gaps to obstruct their GenAI objectives; the fix is specific, not generic.
What we build
A usage inventory, an approved toolset wired to single sign-on, data-handling rules by classification, role-based training built on your own cases and a risk register with named owners.
Measured by unauthorized-use incidents, sensitive-data events, adoption by role, time to approve a new use case.
Seen in practice
A twelve-department experiment measured honestly: self-reported savings, adoption peaking at 83%, and a report that could not say how the saved time was used. That gap is the governance and measurement work.
A 30-minute call. You leave with a one-page map of the workflow you picked, what it costs you today and whether it is worth a fixed-fee assessment.