How an AI Platform Can Help Finance Leaders Drive Strategy and Growth by Managing Regulatory Compliance

Every team in an organization and every leader across its functions can bring big ideas and make bold decisions that help drive growth. However, growth comes with increasing complexity—particularly in managing regulatory compliance and financial risk.

While the primary focus of finance is on an organization’s accounting, budgeting, compliance, and risk practices, finance leaders must also navigate evolving regulations, combat fraud, and ensure financial resilience. By applying precise, tailored artificial intelligence (AI), chief financial officers can gain confidence in maintaining compliance and supercharge their teams, freeing them from everyday tasks so they can think bigger and play a critical role in directing growth strategy.

When finance teams struggle to reach their full potential, legacy technology may be the culprit. Finance leaders working with legacy tools face several challenges.

Lack of integration and data silos. Burdened by manual processes, multiple point solutions, and enterprise resource planning systems, finance leaders and workforces struggle to reconcile company data trapped in spreadsheets and disconnected systems. Relying on such disjointed data sets may make it impossible for finance staff to gain real-time visibility into reporting, spot errors and noncompliance, and consolidate compliance activities across regions. Additionally, legacy systems often lack integration with modern compliance tools, reporting frameworks, and cybersecurity protocols.

Inadequate risk management. Using manual and outdated tools for procure-to-pay (P2P) processes, approval workflows and controls, and risk management drains finance teams’ resources and productivity. More importantly, they lack automation and the advanced capabilities needed to perform real-time risk monitoring across domains and receive actionable recommendations to mitigate threats before they escalate.

Inability to spot patterns. Traditional spend management tools rely on slow, cumbersome processes that drain resources and increase the risk of errors. When teams are overworked and stretched thin trying to do these tasks manually, gaps emerge, and the chances increase for noncompliant behavior to slip through the cracks. Without automation and continuous AI-driven monitoring, organizations struggle to track evolving regulatory changes and identify fraudulent or noncompliant behavior.

AI Advantages

Finance leaders can solve data, risk management, and compliance challenges by upgrading legacy processes and systems to robust AI-native spend management platforms powered by large language models, machine learning, and generative AI that are tailored to their needs.

The best AI-native platforms have compliance embedded and can reduce regulatory risks while increasing efficiency by automating complex tasks, including reporting and documentation. Better yet, they can free finance professionals from the work AI supports so they can focus instead on strategic initiatives.

AI-native spend management platforms offer several advantages.

Improve connection. By unifying P2P processes on one platform, finance teams eliminate disjointed processes and gain a holistic view of all spend across the organization. Having data centralized in one place improves data accuracy and analysis, streamlines reporting, and improves compliance. This connectivity also enables AI-driven risk management and fraud detection to analyze data flowing across the platform in real time, mitigating risks faster and with fewer resources.

Reduce compliance risks. Equipped with automated compliance tools, these platforms simplify audit trails, allow greater data access control to improve security, and heighten operational agility through easily configurable workflows. This technology automates complex tasks such as recordkeeping, reporting, and documentation while comparing real-time organizational data with the relevant compliance regulations and standards.

Provide real-time insights. Predictive insights powered by AI on unified and automated platform technology can illuminate risks in real time across spend categories and flag duplicate invoices, inefficiencies, and suspicious patterns that may indicate fraud or breaches.

How AI Strengthens Compliance

Several organizations that have upgraded to AI-native platforms with compliance technology demonstrate a range of valuable outcomes.

A $3 billion global aid nonprofit had struggled with outdated systems and manual processes, leading to a lack of visibility into and control over spend data, and it wasn’t meeting its diversity and inclusion benchmarks. Upgrading its infrastructure to an AI-native spend-management platform led to inventory optimization of as much as $2 million, a 50% reduction in paper, and an 87% on-contract spend that greatly reduced the organization’s risk exposure. Taken together, these improvements tripled its return on investment and positioned it to achieve $15 million in savings.

When a European food and beverage retailer lacked an official procurement system and automated accounts payable process, employees purchased from various vendors and the finance team could not track, forecast, or budget spending because they could only respond to incoming invoices. After adopting an AI-native spend management platform, the company standardized its procurement processes and now keeps 99% of its spend on-contract, limiting its risk exposure. Employees express greater satisfaction and the finance team can now focus more on their growth strategy.

A global public pharmaceutical giant  once saddled with manual processes, inefficient onboarding, and limited visibility into payment status introduced an AI-native spend management platform to monitor supplier risk and performance and manage payments. Using this technology, the company now processes 98% of its invoices digitally, makes more than 85% of its payments on time, has reduced requisition cycle time sixfold, and onboards more than 1,500 suppliers annually. And its digitized, automated risk detection tool sends alerts and recommendations for real-time action when a supplier’s risk increases.

$7 Trillion in Transactional Data

Organizations relying on outdated procurement, finance, and spend management infrastructure may be losing ground on efficiency, security, and regulatory compliance—exposing the organization to costly risks and fraud and frustrating employees, suppliers, and customers.

Adopting an industry-leading, AI-native spend management platform equipped with compliance, risk management, and cybersecurity technology can help these organizations automate routine tasks and reveal valuable insights hidden in their data.

With a network of 10 million buyers and suppliers and more than $7 trillion in verified transactional data, Coupa’s AI runs on the world’s largest private business-to-business source-to-pay (S2P) data set. The platform’s unified data foundation, intuitive interface, and seamless automated processes help organizations use intelligent insights, recommendations, and actions to optimize spend management and mitigate risks across the entire S2P cycle. The platform enables real-time tracking across spend, identifying patterns from historical data and flagging irregularities such as unusual invoice amounts, noncompliant spend, and atypical vendor or employee behavior.

Organizations using this AI-native spend management platform can benchmark their data and performance against the Coupa Community’s transactional data set and work with greater precision and collaboration across departments and with suppliers. They can become more adept at balancing efficiency and risk, optimizing cash flow, identifying savings opportunities, and keeping compliant with ever-shifting regulations in real time.

And with so much routine work now automated and optimized, finance leaders can contribute more of their valuable insights to mapping their organization’s success.

Learn more about Coupa’s AI-native spend management platform and compliance capabilities in the e-book AP Automations and Payments Guide for Resilience, Growth and Compliance.