The third-annual AP Honors Ceremony celebrated the accounts payable profession and recognized excellence in the field. During the ceremony, Ardent Partners presented awards for outstanding performance and execution in the last year — “The AP Honors” — to a variety of high achievers including Accounts Payable and P2P leaders and teams, as well as ePayables (AP Automation) solution providers and other experts.
Let’s look at the AP Innovation Award winner.
The AP Innovation Award: This award is presented to the AP team that has used new and innovative strategies and approaches to overcome significant hurdles.
Company: Intuit
Key People: Laura Brinker, Senior Global Accounts Payable Manager, and Adam Tanner, who leads intelligent automation for Global Sourcing & Procurement
Employees: 18,200 globally
Website: https://www.intuit.com/
*All data given above is based on publicly available information.
Intuit has long positioned itself as a champion for small businesses, with a mission centered on promoting financial prosperity. Nowhere is this mission more actively applied than within the company’s accounts payable (AP) team, which has taken major steps to modernize invoice processing, strengthen supplier relationships, and shorten payment cycles.
Through the 2025 Prompt Pay initiative and the deployment of a GenAI invoice automation bot, Intuit is reimagining what accuracy, speed, and scalability look like in a global AP function. Those achievements earned the company this year’s AP Honors AP Innovation Award. Ardent Partners spoke to Intuit’s Laura Brinker, Senior Global Accounts Payable Manager, and Adam Tanner, who leads intelligent automation for Global Sourcing & Procurement at Intuit, about how the initiative began, how technology was implemented, and how it is shaping the future of AP operations around the world.
The Spark Behind the Prompt Pay Initiative
The drive to pay small businesses quickly is not new for Intuit. It has been embedded in the company’s mission for many years and was reinforced even more strongly after Intuit received an industry award in 2023 recognizing its progress in payment timeliness. While the AP function has always emphasized paying suppliers on or ahead of terms, Brinker said the Prompt Pay initiative increased expectations by reducing payment timeframes from traditional net 15 or net 10 down to two or three days after receiving an invoice.
The purpose behind this acceleration is straightforward. Faster payments help small businesses meet payroll, continue operations, and maintain a healthy cash flow cycle. Brinker explained that to meet the 95 percent on-time payment goal, the AP team needed to increase speed and accuracy without increasing staffing levels. As is often the case, manual data entry was the bottleneck, and automation offered a pathway to unlock significantly faster processing.
Intuit saw an opportunity to align the Prompt Pay initiative with a broader automation strategy. By pairing the company’s mission with emerging technology capabilities, AP leaders set the foundation for a more scalable and efficient future, she said.
Building the GenAI and OCR-Powered Invoice Bot
Invoice processing had long been a high effort function within Intuit’s source to pay ecosystem. Tanner explained that with more than 3,000 suppliers, each using their own invoice formats, traditional OCR and machine learning tools struggled with the variation. For years, the automation team recognized the opportunity but lacked the technology to solve it effectively.
The emergence of Gen AI and large language models changed that. Tanner said by converting invoice PDFs into text through OCR and feeding the text into an LLM, the system could interpret unstructured data and convert it into a consistent schema that feeds directly into Intuit’s Coupa platform. This eliminated the template rigidity that limited earlier attempts at automation.
Tanner explained that Intuit adopted a phased rollout approach. The first phase focused on the United States, which represents the largest invoice volume but carries lower geographic complexity. The results were immediate. The bot achieved more than 95 percent accuracy, validating the approach and clearing a path for global expansion.
Phase two focused on higher complexity regions including India and the United Kingdom. Tanner said by incorporating tax requirements and regional data needs directly into the bot’s logic, the team was able to continue meeting accuracy targets while scaling internationally. He noted that a human in the loop remains part of the process today to ensure oversight in this high-risk area, although the long-term plan is to minimize human validation where risk thresholds allow.
The AP and automation teams view this as the beginning of a long-term evolution rather than a completed project. As the bot continues to learn and refine its accuracy, Intuit is preparing for broader use cases that extend well beyond invoice entry.
Measurable Gains in Efficiency, Accuracy, and Compliance
The introduction of GenAI-powered invoice processing has already produced significant results. Brinker said accuracy has consistently exceeded the 95 percent threshold that Intuit uses to validate automation success. This accuracy is directly linked to compliance, especially in areas involving tax requirements and audit controls.
Efficiency gains have been equally substantial. Brinker explained that a time study comparing human entry with bot entry revealed that manual processing takes roughly nine minutes per invoice. The bot completes the same task in approximately one and a half minutes. With more than 300,000 invoices processed each year, Brinker noted that the impact on labor hours is considerable and will only grow once human-in-the-loop requirements are reduced.
Cycle time improvements have also strengthened supplier relationships. Tanner said that previously, manual processors worked against a 48-hour SLA. With automation in place, the bot can receive and create an invoice in under one hour. This acceleration feeds directly into Intuit’s Prompt Pay metric, increasing the rate of on-time payments and supporting the financial well-being of small business suppliers.
These improvements reflect the broader goals of the mission: reduce friction, accelerate cash flow, and create an AP function that operates with predictable, measurable performance on a global scale.
Evolving Roles Within AP and Preparing for Strategic Work
While invoice automation has already reduced the manual workload, Intuit’s AP team has not yet fully leveraged staffing opportunities because human validation remains part of the workflow. Brinker said the teams are currently focused on completing global expansion and monitoring accuracy levels across all regions. Once the bot demonstrates stability and meets risk thresholds across the full invoice population, she said AP leaders plan to redirect staff to more strategic and analytical responsibilities.
Future opportunities include managing aging, working on additional automation projects, focusing on tax and compliance complexities, and analyzing exceptions to inform upstream process improvements. The long-term goal, explained Brinker, is to significantly reduce the number of employees dedicated solely to invoice entry and elevate the team toward more value-driven work.
This shift will not only reduce costs but also improve employee engagement by aligning work with higher skill and higher impact activities.
Real-time Dashboards that Strengthen Operational Control
To support automation and global scalability, Intuit has also introduced a new performance tracking system built by its internal reporting team. Historically, Brinker said that tracking invoice processing was challenging because invoices entered the system through multiple paths and human performance varied from one processor to another.
With a centralized GenAI bot, she said the AP team now benefits from a single front door for invoice entry. Dashboards provide real-time or near-real-time views into accuracy, processing times, global aging, and overall payment performance. Brinker noted that this visibility is key to monitoring compliance and ensuring that Prompt Pay targets remain on track across every region.
By owning its reporting capability internally, Intuit can refine monitoring tools quickly and adapt dashboards as the automation footprint grows. This level of transparency would have been far more difficult within a human-driven model, Brinker added.
Scaling Internationally and Expanding the Future of Intelligent Automation
As Intuit continues to expand its international presence, scalable automation capabilities will become increasingly important. Tanner said the AP team already has plans to extend the invoice bot’s capabilities into additional high-value use cases. These include extracting and validating supplier banking information, a process that, when handled manually, can create payment failures and delays. Automating this validation upstream helps prevent late payments and improves the supplier experience.
Tanner said another planned enhancement is automated exception management. If an invoice is missing a purchase order, for example, the bot could initiate communication with the supplier, collect needed information, and reprocess the invoice without a human intermediary. This reduction in communication lag further supports faster payment cycles.
In the long term, Intuit sees opportunities to bring automation into other areas of source to pay such as contract data extraction and supplier negotiations. The goal is consistent: eliminate monotonous work and free employees to focus on strategic responsibilities that require human judgment.
A Future Built on Innovation and Human Potential
The work that Intuit’s AP and intelligent automation teams have accomplished reflects the company’s broader philosophy. Tanner said that by combining AI innovation with a mission centered on helping small businesses prosper, Intuit is demonstrating how digital transformation can deliver measurable benefits to suppliers, employees, and the business.
The 2025 Prompt Pay initiative and the GenAI invoice bot represent significant steps forward, but they are also early milestones in a larger journey. Tanner noted that as technology expands and global needs evolve, Intuit is positioning itself to scale efficiently, strengthen supplier relationships, reduce operational costs, and ensure that small businesses around the world receive the timely payments that support their success.
