3 Ways AI Is Revolutionizing Professional Services
For nearly every sector, AI and ML are not elements of a far flung future, but real tools useful to companies right now. Few industries feature more paperwork or repetitive tasks than the big two professional services — accounting and legal work — and tasks like invoice review, budgeting and compliance are particularly well-suited for AI intervention.
Look to the legal and finance departments within enterprise companies; too often in-house counsel are bogged down in administrative paperwork that takes away from thought-provoking, value-creating pursuits. While this represents a kind of busywork, the repetitive tasks in legal and finance are more likely to be highly sensitive and highly valuable.
AI offers an answer, and according to Deloitte, the technology will soon be inextricable from other processes within legal and finance departments. While there are innumerable ways artificial intelligence and machine learning can transform business, here are three ways the emerging technology has already changed two of the oldest lines of professional work:
Corporate legal departments and accounting firms process an incredible number of complex invoices each month, and the professionals who oversee that work should welcome the extra hands provided by AI. But what does it look like when the task of reading and categorizing line items is entrusted to an algorithm?
Natural language processing tools can interpret invoice text with near-human insight and improve their accuracy over time when trained via machine learning protocols. In legal invoicing, for instance, there are now opportunities for software to not only confirm the contents of line item narratives, but also to compare them against client billing guidelines when making invoice approval decisions.
Select invoices may even be processed by the AI without any human intervention whatsoever. For instance, if the invoice matches a very specific set of financial and compliance criteria, the software can be programmed to route the approved expenses to accounts payable without bothering a human reviewer. For most invoices, however, the most significant AI impact comes from flagging and surfacing the issues that are worth a human reviewer’s attention. This is especially true of large invoices that have one or more soft violations of billing guidelines.
Within most enterprises, budgets are set ahead of the new fiscal year and remain fixed for 12 months. When the next round of budgeting comes around, the finance department brings up the previous year’s budget as a starting point. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 showed us the folly of planning too far ahead. As a result, companies had to revisit their budgets several times, and when budgeting for 2021 began, most would concede that the 2020 budget wasn’t their best guide.
