We’re in the Gold Rush days of AI, with businesses small and large throwing significant resources at AI-powered tools designed to maximize efficiency and minimize expenses. But do these finance AI tools really work? Or is this a case of setting money on fire in pursuit of the latest trend?
While the age of AI is still in its infancy, many AI tools and assistants are already powerful enough to make a real impact on your business’s bottom line. The challenge, ironically, is a human one. In many cases, AI is not yet intelligent enough to suss out which processes it can fix or improve on its own, so it’s up to you as a business leader to flex your creativity by using these innovative tools to help you reach your goals.
For example, many business leaders are already thinking about how to employ AI as a financial tool, and new use cases continue to emerge. Here are six of our favorites, which apply across businesses ranging from startups to large corporations. Most involve automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks — freeing up your humans to do their best work.
The first step in exploring new AI tools should be a comprehensive audit of your business’s most repetitive tasks. This audit often identifies payroll as a prime candidate for an AI-powered boost. Indeed, many aspects of payroll are repetitive and prone to human error, from employee timesheets to tax registration forms.
New and developing payroll software can serve as a personal assistant to your payroll team. AI algorithms are already remarkably capable at identifying inconsistencies and missing information in data, and they can help to ensure that your payroll calculations are as consistent as possible. This can mean flagging when total wages are higher than typical for one employee or notifying team members when tax registrations are missing or out of date.
This second point is worth lingering on, as taxes are an especially onerous aspect of payroll. An AI assistant makes it easier to ensure full tax compliance by notifying employees of which tax forms they need — and helping them track down and complete them proactively.
It’s rare to find a business that’s entirely happy with its onboarding process. This is especially true when it comes to contractors, many of whom are onboarded by employees with little experience and no shared documentation to walk them through the process. Instead of relying on an online document that’s prone to errors, oversight, and lack of maintenance, consider using an AI-powered assistant to guide your employees through the onboarding process.
When it comes to the natural language processing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), many businesses tend to focus too narrowly on customer-facing use cases like customer service chatbots. Cleaning up your internal processes first can lead to even more efficiency, and there’s no better place to start than in the painful realm of onboarding. What’s more, you can get real-time feedback from your employees on how it’s working, and adjust your AI inputs accordingly.
When you’re running a small business or startup, it’s important to keep track of every dollar you spend. AI has proven quite capable of examining business expenses, automatically categorizing them, and spinning up real-time reports that show where your spend is going (and where you might be able to cut costs).
AI tools can also notify you if you’re at risk of exceeding pre-allocated budgets, allowing you to adjust accordingly before your credit card statement arrives.
As your business scales up, you may find that you’re struggling to send payments to many vendors and suppliers at once. These growing pains are normal, but ignoring them can put you at risk of losing important suppliers or running afoul of local payment regulations.
It’s especially important to stay on top of supplier payments if you work with international contractors, as many of our customers at Omi do. Powered by machine learning, financial tools like Omi can help you simplify and automate your payments at scale. AI can also assist you in building custom payment workflows for diverse vendors.
On the international side of the coin, it can also help protect you from currency risk by analyzing recent moves in the price of one currency in relation to another, and ensuring that you convert money at the most advantageous rates. As a feature in a multi-currency bank account, AI has major potential to save international businesses real money over time.
All businesses could benefit from paying close attention to their customers’ feedback. But sometimes day-to-day realities get in the way, and it becomes impossible to sift through hundreds or thousands of survey results or online reviews for key insights.
Business leaders often focus on what AI can do with numbers. But, as scientists and academic researchers have already discovered, LLMs are especially useful in analyzing huge amounts of text and summarizing the most relevant points. This capability can be brought to bear on qualitative customer feedback, which you can feed into an LLM with a request to summarize the major trends and takeaways.
Some AI tools can even create helpful visualizations such as word clouds to help you hone in on priorities to improve your customer experience. Because customer satisfaction is such a critical aspect of sales and retention, responding proactively to customer feedback is an important way to boost your bottom line.
Getting a notice from the tax office is never fun, especially for small-business leaders who may not be well-versed in how to respond. The good news? AI tools can make this aspect of financial reconciliation far less painful.
AI can quickly review financial records and tax filings to identify any errors you might have made. It can then suggest ways to gather the necessary tax documents and evidence for submission to the tax authorities.
If you’re not even sure what a tax notice is trying to tell you, some AI tools allow you to simply scan or photograph the notice and then communicate to you exactly how to resolve it. This can help you to pay any outstanding amounts due and avoid future penalties you may not be able to afford.
There are dozens of ways AI can help you tackle your business’s most pressing financial problems. But it’s important to remember that even AI has its limits. Nothing can beat a comprehensive financial platform that uses both machine learning and human insights to deliver a simplified, automated experience that scales for every level of business.
That’s what we’re building at Omi, and that’s why we’re launching our latest product, Omi. Sheets is our latest way to help you track and automate your business payments, and we’re excited to show it off. For a demo, send an email to hello@tryomi.com to learn how Omi can help your business.
Omi makes it easy to keep track of our vendors and gives us actionable insights into our finances where we don’t have to open excel
