We Polled the Room During Our AI-Native AP Webinar. Here's What Finance Leaders Actually Said.

A couple weeks ago, Daniel and I hosted a webinar on AI-native accounts payable. Somewhere between explaining what “AI-native” actually means and walking through the platform, we ran a handful of live polls with the audience. Nothing scientific, just a pulse check on a room full of AP and finance leaders from companies like Starbucks, Zimmer Biomet, and Hitachi Energy.

The answers were more useful than I expected. A few things stood out enough that I wanted to write them down.

Manual exceptions are still the number one problem.

More than half the room told us manual exception handling is their biggest AP pain point right now, well ahead of slow approvals or supplier compliance. That tracks with what we hear in almost every sales conversation. AP teams don’t lose time on the invoices that go smoothly. They lose it on the ones that don’t, and there’s no shortage of those. The interesting part isn’t that exceptions happen. It’s that the same exceptions happen, month after month, across hundreds of suppliers, and most platforms still treat each one like a surprise.

Most people are using “AI.” Almost nobody is using AI-native.

When we asked how people would describe their organization’s use of AI in AP today, the largest group said they’re using point features like OCR or auto-coding. Only about a quarter said they’re actively evaluating AI-native platforms, and just over one in ten said they already have something AI-native running.

That gap is the whole reason we built the session the way we did. AI-powered and AI-native get used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. One is a feature. The other is an architecture. Most of the room is still living in the first category, which is fine, that’s where the industry has been for years. But it also means most of the room hasn’t seen what the second category actually looks like yet.

Touchless invoice rate is the metric everyone’s chasing.

Half the audience said touchless invoice rate is the metric they’re under the most pressure to improve this year, ahead of days payable outstanding, cost per invoice, and cash visibility combined. That’s not surprising. Touchless rate is the metric that makes every other AP problem visible. If you can’t get invoices through without a human touching them, you don’t have an exception problem. You have a foundation problem.

Supplier experience is still an afterthought, and everyone knows it.

This is the one that actually got to me a little. When we asked how central supplier experience is to their AP strategy, the answers were split almost evenly between “not really a factor” and “we think about it but don’t measure it.” Nobody said it was core to their roadmap.

I don’t think that’s because finance leaders don’t care about their suppliers. I think it’s because the tools they’ve had never gave them a reason to. You can’t prioritize what you can’t see, and most AP platforms have never given anyone visibility into the supplier side of the transaction. That’s the entire premise behind Supplier First™, and it’s exactly why I keep coming back to it every time I talk about AI in AP. The technology isn’t the hard part anymore. Building for the right side of the transaction is.

What I’m taking away from this.

None of this is a knock on the people who answered these polls. If anything, it confirmed something I already believed: most AP leaders know exactly where the problems are. Manual exceptions, an unclear AI strategy, a metric they’re being held to that they can’t move fast enough, and a supplier relationship nobody’s built for. What’s missing isn’t awareness. It’s a platform that was actually designed around all four of those things at once, instead of bolting a feature onto whatever was already there.