SAP AI

AI in Finance:
All The Reasons
To Dive In
SAP AI IN FINANCE 2/8

According to a recent survey by IDC¹, finance leaders

believe that applying artificial intelligence (AI) to
­finance business processes can dramatically increase
the performance of activities ranging from payments
to expense management, financial closure to invoice
management – and auditing, forecasting, budgeting,
and planning. AI helps finance departments transform
their operations. What’s more? AI is already available
in everyday finance applications – so CFOs can dive
right in.

Finance: Areas with Opportunity for

Improvement with AI¹
In the future, what areas do you feel applying more AI to would most
dramatically improve your organization‘s Financial applications performance
metrics?

Areas with Opportunity for Improvement with AI in Financial Apps

Payments 46.4 %

Expense
Management
45 %

Analytics 44.6 %

Financial
Close
44.1 %

Invoice
Management
39.6 %

Forecasting,
Budgeting, 39.2 %
Planning

Receivables
Management
38.3 %
© 2022 SAP. All rights reserved.

Auditing 32.4 %

0 10 20 30 40 50

1 IDC, AI Path 2021: Application Vendor Ratings, Doc # US48229321, September 2021
SAP AI IN FINANCE
Today’s Challenges
The growing interest in leveraging AI to optimize
finance processes is not surprising, as business
expectations are growing and finance teams
face unprecedented challenges. The number of
business transactions is increasing, and the
„Great Retirement“ has exacerbated the talent
shortage, forcing financial teams to struggle just
to keep the lights on. Not enough time is left
to help provide financial guidance and steer the
business toward products, services, customers,
and partners that will bring long-term, sustain­
able success.
Shifting market conditions and regulations
increase business complexity. Today, finance
teams must navigate inflation and market
volatility while planning for liquidity. Effective risk
management becomes a challenge. Tax and
governmental agencies have enhanced their audit­-
ing capa­bilities with sophisticated data analytics,
leaving companies no margin of error in their
disclosures. Plus, a fast-evolving geo­political
landscape makes it hard to keep up with changes
in import/export duties, embargoes, and
sanctions, increasing companies‘ risk exposure.
3/8
With understaffed finance departments, com­
panies are hampered when they explore new
business opportunities, such as entering a new
market or adopting a new business model.
Finance expertise is required in business
activities ranging from validating business plans
to onboarding new acquisitions to devising a new
pricing strategy. The lack of easy access to data
locked in many systems inside and outside
the enterprise further exacerbates the challenge.
Already strained finance teams face hurdles to
get the information they need to assess
the situation, explore different scenarios, and
effectively advise the business.
Only the widespread adoption of AI across
finance business processes, prompt access to
trusted, always up-to-date predictions, and
proactive controls can help finance organiza-
tions cope with growing workloads and find
time for strategic activities that can steer the
business to success.
© 2022 SAP. All rights reserved.
SAP AI IN FINANCE 4/8

Ride The Next Wave of With AI enabling analysts to predict and model

Digitalization complex business scenarios in real-time,

Digitalization already flows through the business
world. But AI can ensure that finance rides
the next wave of digital innovation. Investing in
AI has become essential for finance departments
that want to avoid falling behind in achieving
the next level of digitalization. Yet, to maximize
ROI, AI investments must advance CFOs’
business priorities, enabling finance teams to
become more productive and proactive while
reducing compliance risks.
Leveraging AI in finance processes dramatically
increases the productivity of finance teams.
Contrary to rule-driven automation, whose ef­fects
degrade over time, AI models continuously
learn from the context in which they operate.
When business processes embed AI capabilities,
algo­­rithms can recognize changing business
patterns, learn from human exception handling,
and recommend retraining when performance
can improve.
finance teams have become more proactive and
strategic.
AI-powered insights not only
factor in historical patterns but
also capture and adjust
to business events as they
happen.
This makes it possible to set up proactive risk
and exposure alerts, promptly identify and react
to changes in customer sentiment, anticipate
supply chain disruption, and prepare for the
impact of upcoming regulations.
Proactively enforcing finance processes’
com­pliance with industry, government, and tax
regulations lowers business risks and liabilities.
For example, AI can ensure that the information
used to create journal entries is accurate,
detect errors in financial transactions, and
automatically propose remedies based on past
successful interventions.

Set up risk
and exposure
alerts
React to
fluctuating
customer
Suggest sentiments
appropriate
course
changes
Benefits of
AI in Finance
© 2022 SAP. All rights reserved.

Anticipate
supply chain
Seamlessly
disruption
adopt new
compliances
SAP AI IN FINANCE
A Partner In AI
SAP is uniquely positioned to help companies
strategically adopt AI across the enterprise.
With AI-powered insights, recommendations,
and automation built into SAP applications and
pre-trained AI models to address specific
functional needs, organizations can transform
every aspect of their end-to-end business
processes faster and with less risk.
5/8
AI is already built into your SAP
applications – easily improving
accuracy and decreasing time
spent on everyday processes.
Also, accounts payable and receivable profes-
sionals can use powerful predictive analytics
models to devise payment and collection
strategies, while AI-powered business integrity
screening and access governance enhance
security and compliance.
© 2022 SAP. All rights reserved.
SAP AI IN FINANCE
Optimize Finance Business
Processes
SAP customers have countless opportunities
to leverage AI for optimizing finance business
pro­cesses. SAP applications come with embedded
AI capabilities that work seamlessly with other
SAP BTP advanced technologies to maximize
business impact and lower implementation risk.
For example, to streamline the invoice-to-cash
process, SAP S/4HANA customers seamlessly
leverage optical character recognition (OCR)
technology to extract key information from
payment advice notes while AI models match it
with open receivables. Under the hood, RPA
technology loads the information extracted from
the digital documents into SAP S/4HANA and
routes matching exceptions to accountants for
clearing. Freed from tedious tasks, account
receivables teams can focus on more strategic
activities.
To illustrate, Accenture was able to match invoices
and payments faster, with fewer errors and
increase their automatic clearing hit rate more
than 24% using SAP Cash Application.
6/8
Similar ready-to-use information extraction
capabilities, automated workflows, and pre-trained
AI models are available to improve efficiency
across all finance processes – from automatically
processing account payable documents in
the invoice-to-pay process to reconciling
goods-receipts with invoice-receipts in both
invoice-to-pay and record-to-report processes.
Intelligent predictions also accelerate financial
closure. For example, the AI models for
goods-receipts to invoice-receipts reconciliation
help accountants identify the root cause of
discrepancies encountered during the matching-
process, saving valuable time in the
record-to-report process – especially in complex
intercompany reconciliations.
“The collaboration of our
Global IT organization and SAP
on the development of the
technical solution combined
with our cash application
team’s process knowledge is
what led to the right result for
the business.”
Ronald Stevens, Managing Director –
Controllership Capability, Accenture
© 2022 SAP. All rights reserved.
SAP AI IN FINANCE
Proactively Steer Business
Strategy
SAP customers can use powerful advanced
analytics to devise sound finance strategies. For
example, in the invoice-to-pay process, AI-pow-
ered invoice payment forecasting that runs
on SAP S/4HANA helps accounts payable depart­
ments predict when to expect payments from
at-risk customers. This helps the financial team
optimize payment strategies and cash flow
management.
Similarly, SAP AI helps treasury departments
anticipate future liquidity needs to make timely
investment decisions. Predictive analytics in
SAP S/4HANA helps mitigate liquidity risks by
leveraging operating activities, such as invoice
payment dates, historical transactional data
trends, and external market data.
Intelligent predictions improve
the accuracy of mid-to-long
term liquidity forecasts
and help finance managers
optimize investments.
7/8
Ensure Compliance and
Lower Business Risk
Compliance with statutory regulations and
re­porting accuracy are top of mind for our
customers. With SAP AI-powered governance,
compliance, and risk management solutions,
finance departments can identify and respond to
risks as they arise. For example, by applying AI
and behavioral analytics to large volumes of
historical and real-time transactions, managers
can identify potentially illegitimate transactions
and errors that could lead to financial liability.
Similarly, finance departments can use AI
to streamline governance and help prevent un­-
authorized access to sensitive data and ap­
plications. AI empowers administrators to grant
access rights that consider a broader set of
parameters, such as business processes, job
functions, existing access privileges, and compa-
ny policies. The result is an optimal access
granularity that improves user productivity and
mitigates compliance risks.
Reporting accuracy is also paramount for any
finance organization. SAP AI-powered solutions
help improve accuracy across finance business
processes. For example, in the record-to-report
business process, it is possible to automate
the posting of new journal entries to avoid manu­
al errors – a critical step for improving reporting
accuracy and compliance.
© 2022 SAP. All rights reserved.
By partnering with SAP, companies can transform
every aspect of their finance operations with
AI-powered insights, recommendations, and
automation built into SAP applications and then
scale and extend these capabilities across all
finance business processes.

More information about SAP AI can be found at

www.sap.com/ai.

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10/22

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