AI-enabled O2C – making frictionless finance a reality

Over the past few years, organizations have been moving away from traditional ways of working and a wanting to do a lot more with less and all the while improving business outcomes. Leveraging the right solution to make it easy for customer to buy and pay, collect money fast, seamlessly post cash, reduce exceptions across order-to-cash (O2C) and boost working capital is important now more than ever.

In order to successfully deliver these business outcomes and continue to grow, your finance teams need to be connected and focused on the right type of activities such as improving customer experience and eliminating exceptions.

Enable your customers to buy more and pay faster

The next generation of O2C technology and platforms can deliver the extra innovation needed to gain advantage. Providers that deliver data orchestration, automated insights, predictive analytics, and simple self-service functionality for customers are driving enhanced O2C outcomes through incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) coupled with machine learning to power decision-making.

However, while most solutions are designed to manage exceptions faster – they don’t really eliminate work, with your teams often having to resolve the same disputes or posting manual cash for the same customers every month. This represents a huge drain on your customer, sales, and cash flow.

To truly improve results and deliver an excellent customer experience, you need a solution that eliminates friction, drives customer to self service, and is supported by a customer obsessed digital team – clearing a path for your customers to buy more and pay faster.

Frictionless O2C delivered via an AI-augmented workforce

Reimagining the future of your O2C requires that you move away from the traditional approach to O2C and start the journey with the outcome in mind. This requires you to design a solution that eliminates manual touchpoints and frictions such as multiple parties manually touching the same invoice, order, or payment.

Next-generation tools and platforms have moved beyond traditional ways of handling finance activities. They are often modeled around gaming systems and mobile applications, deliver plug and play connectivity, an Amazon-style experience, and standardize processes through a “utility” style platform framework. They are dynamic, focus effort on critical activities, incorporate behavioral analytics, insights and AI as a standard feature, and deliver augmented intelligence to your teams.

An AI-based O2C platform can deliver stronger business outcomes such as 30–40% days sales outstanding (DSO) improvements, 35% increase in efficiency, and up to 60% frictionless processing (digital augmented straight-through processing) when integrated with intelligent automation.

Realizing the frictionless enterprise with AI

The road to frictionless commerce starts with a fully integrated solution that makes it easy for your customers to buy and pay, makes interactions more valuable, and delivers results that you can’t get with a traditional model. Now is the time for your organization to be bold with its O2C vision and roadmap – augmenting your workforce with AI to “act now” instead of “react later.” Insights to enable smart decision-making, dependable results, and an AI-augmented workforce can help your organization to excel.

In the current climate in which cash is tight, AI can bring about better and faster decision-making by rapidly connecting dots that humans can’t see, and in a way that excels performance and outcomes.

To learn how Capgemini’s AI.Receivables solution delivers frictionless, next-generation O2C processes to drive enhanced outcomes and make Frictionless Finance a reality for your organization, contact: divya.bhaskaran@capgemini.com

Divya Turner is the current global process owner for order-to-cash (O2C), the product owner for AI. Receivables, and has over 15 years of experience in driving innovation in O2C.