It’s hard to believe that we’re ready to wrap up 2019. It’s been a great year for Dooap – among other accomplishments, we moved our office to Austin, Texas and expanded our team of professionals.
In our blogs over the year, we shared insights of a survey we conducted with Ardent Partners on invoice automation practices; interviewed Todd Albers, Senior Payments Consultant, The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, on the state of e-invoicing; reported e-Invoicing insights from the Exchange Summit; as well as discussed a variety of topics, including digital process being the pre-requisite for augmentation of AI in any process, and improving AP practices.
Now it’s time to look ahead. Based on our work with organizations, discussions with industry experts, and knowledge of the market, the following is our annual list of predictions, and trends you should look out for in the coming year:
While rule-based process automation continues to play a major role within AP automation, organizations’ focus on AI and machine learning will drive advanced automation use cases and user experience as organizations increasingly look to it for competitive advantage. For AP automation, capturing all the data in invoices accurately and quickly is a key first step to being able to analyze the data, and AI and machine learning are effective ways to achieve that.
But 2020 is not just the beginning of a new year, but a new decade as well. Looking further ahead – five to 10 years from now, the hype around blockchain will be over, and users will find the most effective use cases for the technology, be it blockchain or something else. According to Gartner, smart contracts could interact with each other, typically using blockchain to automatically implement or verify transactions and other business processes. This would require a trusted ecosystem, where payments could be verified against POs, contracts, or goods received and invoices are no longer needed. While this may be a possibility further in the future, we should put thought into building AP process architecture to accommodate it.
It’s clear that 2020 will be an exciting year of growth and maturity for the industry. We look forward to helping you navigate your automation journey to achieve better efficiencies, visibility, and control over your AP process to make 2020 a very good year for you as well.
Learn more on how to get started in your AP Automation journey.