All Posts

Whenever I talk with finance leaders about AI agents, one question shows up within the first few minutes. What if the agent decides to approve a $5 million invoice? It is a fair question, and it is the kind that keeps a CFO up at night. The short answer is that it cannot, and the reason has less to do with the AI than with how the system around it is built. An agent is a user with a job description When an agent connects to Direct Commerce through our MCP server, we treat it

If you evaluate an invoice capture tool, the most important moment is the first time you use it. That is when it knows the least about your suppliers, and it is the worst experience you will ever have with ours. I say that on purpose. Every invoice we process teaches the system something. On day one we may never have seen a supplier's format before. By the hundredth invoice from that supplier, accuracy has already improved. The floor is the first use, and it only goes up from

Think about a vending machine. The recipe is welded inside. It makes one sandwich, and it makes it well. If you want a different sandwich, you do not ask the machine. You commission a new machine from the factory. Most AP platforms work this way, even the ones that now advertise AI. The workflow, meaning which statuses exist, which moves are allowed, and what it takes to approve or dispute something, is baked into the software. Changing it is an engineering project. Where the

AP teams have absorbed years of AI hype, but where do they actually stand? We polled a room of AP managers, controllers, and finance leaders during a recent webinar on AI-native accounts payable. The results: manual exceptions are still the top pain point, most teams have AI features but not AI-native systems, touchless rate is under the most pressure, and supplier experience remains a known gap nobody has fully built for.

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

Direct Commerce's innovative platform was gamechanging for Nationwide Consulting When a small business works with global enterprises, visibility isn't a nice-to-have. It's vital. Robert Hanson knows this fact intimately. He also knows a thing or two about Accounts Payable – he's been working with clients (and their AP systems) since the 1990s. He also knows how damaging inefficiencies in the AP process can be – as every supplier inquiry, back and forth with a buyer, and del

We've all seen it - the dreaded "trough of disillusionment." The point where a once-promising technology comes crashing back down to earth, seemingly written off. Are we at that point in AP Automation? The latest report from Gartner®, the 2025 Hype Cycle™ for Procurement and Sourcing Solutions 2025 states "Procurement can accelerate its key value propositions by investing in emerging technologies to optimize and automate across processes. Procurement technology leaders should