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 AI Innovation of the Year award winner.
AI Innovation of the Year: Presented to the solution provider who most significantly impacted the market with their innovative use of AI.
Company: Basware
Key People: Lars Madsen, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO); and Abs Hassanali, Head of Communications
Employees: 1,350+, working across 16 countries
Countries serving clients: 190+
Website: https://www.basware.com/en
*All data given above is based on publicly available information.
For Basware, winning this year’s AP Honors AI Innovation of the Year award represents more than industry recognition: It reflects a strategic vision nearly a decade in the making. Ardent Partners spoke to Basware’s Lars Madsen, chief marketing officer, and Abs Hassanali, head of communications, about the company’s cloud-based solution offerings and the evolving role of artificial intelligence (AI). First and foremost, AI is not a side project for Basware or a discrete roadmap item; it has become an embedded, foundational component of every product capability the company develops.
What began between 2016 and 2018 with early machine learning initiatives has evolved into a complete AI-first approach, where no feature is designed without an intelligent layer behind it. The AI Innovation of the Year award validates not only leadership in invoice lifecycle management, but also Basware’s focus on leveraging AI with purpose and integrity to drive measurable, practical value for finance teams. In a landscape where AI has become a buzzword, the company’s long-term investment and deep expertise serve as proof that real innovation comes from years of applied learning rather than overnight hype.
Scale Becomes a Competitive Advantage
What sets Basware apart from other solution providers is its platform’s vast dataset. Madsen explained that more than 2 billion invoices were used to train its AI models. AI thrives on data volume and diversity, providing scale that enables higher accuracy results, more reliable automation, and compelling insights.
Ardent Partners’ research, in partnership with Basware, found that through AI utilization, customers significantly outperform the market in key AP performance metrics. While the industry standard for invoice cycle time is 10.1 days, Basware’s top-performing clients are achieving dramatic reductions that are measured in hours rather than days. True touchless processing, from ingestion to payment, exceeds 89% for the company’s strongest adopters. Ultimately, Madsen said the value of AI is not in the technology itself, but the results it enables and the ability to develop a more strategic finance function.
Reinventing Non-PO Invoice Coding at Scale
Within AP processes, one of the most time-consuming and error-prone elements is non-PO invoices. Madsen explained that roughly one-third of global invoices arrive without a purchase order, spanning categories where a PO is unnecessary or impractical. He said SmartCoding , one of the company’s flagship AI capabilities, addresses this challenge by recommending how each invoice should be coded, based on historical postings, patterns, and the organization’s P&L structure.
While the technology could fully automate coding, customers often prefer retaining human approval to meet audit requirements. This hybrid model where AI recommendations and human verification coincide, ensures accuracy, transparency, and compliance. To operate at a global scale across borders, formats, and languages, SmartCoding must rely on immense volumes of training data. When deployed effectively, Madsen said it reduces manual work, prevents coding errors, and prepares organizations to scale their operations without increasing workload.
A company reaping the benefits of SmartCoding is Heidelberg Materials, one of Basware’s standout customers that achieved a 48% touchless rate and 88% coding accuracy using SmartCoding capabilities. Heidelberg’s experience demonstrates how AI can reimagine labor allocation and optimize finance operations. Instead of manually reconciling, coding, or reprocessing invoices, Madsen said teams can focus on value-added activities, such as analyzing spending trends, collaborating with procurement, or improving working capital strategies.
The real ROI, Madsen explained, comes not only from reducing manual work, but from elevating the role of finance professionals, allowing them to work smarter, not harder. When combined with Basware’s Insights platform, organizations unlock even deeper efficiencies across treasury, forecasting, and supplier management. AI becomes the engine that transforms AP from a cost center into a strategic contributor, he emphasized.
Basware Leverages AI in SmartPDF and Insights Pro
SmartCoding is just one of Basware’s AI-powered advancements. Despite major innovations in digital finance, many organizations remain heavily dependent on PDFs. Traditional OCR-based systems, built on decades-old technology, struggle to interpret diverse formats, languages, and layouts. Madsen said SmartPDF replaces OCR with AI-powered image recognition that extracts structured data with far higher accuracy.
This improvement has a cascading impact: better data quality at ingestion reduces manual touches downstream, accelerates processing, improves results for SmartCoding, and enhances the integrity of the entire invoice lifecycle. For global enterprises operating across dozens of countries, the ability to process PDFs in any language, from Chinese to Danish, provides a transformative level of consistency, reliability, and scalability.
Another advancement helps organizations shift from reaction to proactive financial management decision-making. Madsen explained that the company’s Insights Pro solution is an AI-enabled analytics and process mining tool, providing the ability to identify bottlenecks, analyze supplier performance, and understand the root causes of low touchless rates. Whether you’re a casual user who wants to know the top 10 suppliers over the last year or a more advanced user seeking complexities at a granular level, both receive a narrative explanation and accompanying dashboards. This is the beauty of AI-power, said Madsen, with the platform adapting to the priorities of the user.
AI Agents and the Future of Finance Automation
What’s next for Basware? Abs Hassanali said the company’s next generation of capabilities, including AI agents, advanced scenario modeling, and SmartMatching , represents the next frontier in invoice lifecycle management. The mission is ambitious he said: deliver solutions that are 100% automated, compliant, and protected. As AI becomes more powerful for both finance teams and bad actors, the stakes have never been higher.
The industry faces an arms race between automation and fraud, and organizations must stay ahead by deploying smart, secure, adaptive technologies. Madsen and Hassanali said the company’s long-term vision centers on removing friction from financial operations so customers can focus on what they do best, whether building airplanes, brewing beer, or delivering medical care.
With its deep commitment to customer value and relentless drive for AI-powered innovation, Basware is redefining the expectations of what finance teams should expect from their technology partners.
