Meet Billy the Bot, Stampli’s Accounts Payable AI

“He’s a funny little blue guy that’s very helpful.”

When you think of artificial intelligence, you probably think of chatbots or robots or self-driving cars; the phrase “funny little blue guy” isn’t likely to be the thing that first springs to mind. But that’s exactly what Milissa Douglas, Controller of CorkHoward Construction Company, said about Billy the Bot — Stampli’s Accounts Payable AI.

Let’s start by explaining Billy from a technical standpoint: It’s a powerful AI designed to automate the manual aspects of the entire invoice lifecycle. For example:

• Once a Stampli customer receives an invoice, Billy gets right to work coding key data from the document — vendor name, date, location, line items, quantities, and more. 
• Billy auto-codes the invoice to the correct general ledger accounts, ensuring accurate financial reporting without any manual classification needed.
• Billy auto-detects duplicate invoices so you don’t accidentally pay vendors twice or waste time having to figure out if it was already processed.
• Billy looks at discrepancies between the invoice total amount and PO total amount, if it’s a match, Billy knows when to skip approvals for an invoice
• Billy recognizes company policies to determine appropriate people for approval routing
• As invoices go through approvals, Billy tracks their status and sends timely reminders to prevent bottlenecks.

That’s the technical explanation. But there’s something more to Billy: He’s not just an AI. He’s a member of your team.

“We love Billy,” says Isa Stegman, Sr. Vice President of Finance at OpticalTel. “Billy freed up our data input time, which has given us more time to focus on other areas of our department. Billy is our AP clerk that works 24/7.”

How does technology create such fond feelings in its users?

For starters, there’s the value Billy creates: For companies, Billy saves money through reduced labor costs and increased process efficiency. AP teams handle 30-50% more work volume without expanding headcount. For employees, Billy eliminates the frustrating scramble of hunting down invoices, coding, and chasing approvals. Instead they focus on strategy, exceptions management, and value-added analysis. Rather than wasting skills on repetitive manual work, AP staff enjoy more rewarding responsibilities.

But it’s not just that. There are two additional aspects of Billy that create genuine feelings of fondness amongst those who know it:

• Billy does the work, but you make the decisions. “You control Billy, Billy doesn’t control you,” says Jordan Hales, Finance Director of Spanish Fork City. “Whenever you have AI suggesting data that will make it into your accounting systems you get a little nervous. What alleviated our concerns was that all of the data that Billy the Bot was populating were simply suggestions that could be overridden by our staff. As you get more familiar with Billy and begin to trust it more you will find yourself using it more, but you are able to ease into it at your own pace.”
  
• Billy is fun. When you work in Stampli, you encounter Billy a lot. And when you meet Billy, it’s always a good time. You’ll find Billy celebrating your successes, playing in the autumn leaves, and snowboarding in the winter. Members of Stampli’s Product Council even receive custom-designed Billy icons that look like them! However, all of this fun is also highly strategic: It’s critical that the users see AI as a “who” as opposed to a “what” because that encourages users to work with the AI instead of viewing it as a threat to their jobs.

Billy isn’t programmed. Billy learns.

Traditional (non-AI) software is built utilizing predefined rules and logic. That’s why that kind of software has a six month setup period where you engage highly-paid developers to game out and debug every edge case.

Stampli is up and running in days. That’s because, as an AI, Billy benefits from a self-learning architecture.

When you onboard with Stampli, no one at Stampli writes out complex code and flow charts to explicitly tell Billy how to handle invoices step-by-step. Through machine learning models, Billy observes millions of invoices and effectively programs itself to extract key details with increasing accuracy. Instead of following static instructions, Billy continuously refines its understanding of your invoices over time.

The more diverse invoice types, formats, and layouts that customers expose it to, the more knowledge Billy gains autonomously. So Billy doesn’t rely on meticulous programming from developers. Billy learns by doing, allowing its skills to dynamically keep pace with evolving customer needs.

Here’s another way to think about it: Billy learns just like a human employee. No human steps into the job and nails it from day one, but the best employees quickly go from requiring guidance to operating autonomously. Think of Billy the same way: Every time you adjust its suggestions, it learns from you, and gets that much better.

“My current AP person came on as a specialist who spent 90% of her time doing AP work. And without Stampli’s AI, as our volume grew, I would have needed to have five full time Accounts Payable team members,” said Anthony Fernandes, Group Controller of Alden Renewables. “But with Stampli’s AI, I have just this one person doing AP, and doing it in just 20% of her time. That’s a 25X boost in efficiency — AND this person spends the remainder of her time on much more strategic activities.”

What about hallucinations?

“Hallucination” is when AI chatbots generate responses that seem real but are fabricated or inaccurate. This is obviously a major concern for finance leaders relying on data to drive decisions. You cannot afford even a single hallucinated decimal point, let alone completely fabricated numbers or transactions.

It’s important to understand why Billy is different. The reason this happens with chatbots like ChatGPT is they train on messy web data (which can include social media posts, comments on articles, and biased news sources), with the goal of mimicking human communication patterns — as opposed to learning facts. In addition, their free-flowing text outputs allow imagined responses to slip through unseen.

Billy avoids these risks with its tight AP document focus and structured outputs.

• Billy trains solely on real customer invoices and POs to deeply understand precise financial data formats and contents, not random web pages
• Billy outputs coded invoice line items and GL account classifications instead of open-ended text. This leaves little room for imagination.
• Billy’s suggestions are always validated by your finance experts who know your policies and catch inconsistencies.

So with constrained training and outputs plus human oversight, Billy brings productivity gains without sacrificing accuracy.

How can Billy help you?

Highly manual AP processes aren’t just boring and time-consuming — they hold teams back from more strategic initiatives. Imagine if Billy showed up to work tomorrow, eagerly volunteering to take over these responsibilities. Envision handing these dull tasks off to Billy while you and your team focused on the work that truly moved the business forward. Give Stampli a call and see what this “funny little blue guy” can do in partnership with you.