[Editor’s Note: Ardent Partners recently published its Accounts Payable-themed report, “Accounts Payable 2025: BIG Trends and Predictions”. Over the next several weeks, this site will feature our series highlighting the key BIG Trends and Predictions from the report.
As we step into 2025, the world of Accounts Payable (AP) is poised for a transformative year, driven by the accelerating forces of artificial intelligence (“AI”), advanced automation, and the growing recognition of AP’s potential to deliver measurable operational and financial impact.
Since the pandemic began, AP has emerged as a strategic cornerstone for businesses looking to streamline operations, enhance cash flow management, and bolster profitability. AI-powered solutions are helping to redefine the function; the need for smarter cash management and stronger supplier relationships are also aiding the cause.
In this new age, smart executives have identified AP as an area of investment and a lever for driving strategic value. This attention has empowered many AP teams to move beyond transactional tasks, embracing roles that directly influence financial performance and operational excellence.
This Week’s BIG Trend and Prediction
BIG Trend #2 – Intense Focus on Technology, Driven by Sky-High Expectations for AI
Seamless usage and historic impact are sky-high expectations for AI by AP/finance leaders, stemming from the profession’s vast creation, usage, and management of data — all of which are ripe for AI-driven analysis that can expand automation levels and efficiency, streamline processing, and enhance decision-making. AI’s potential to better automate tasks across the department, coupled with its ability to provide personalized guidance and insights to the occasional system users (like approvers and suppliers), fuels this enthusiasm. Specific applications — like automated data extraction from invoices and anomaly detection for suspicious payments within accounts payable — further demonstrate AI’s transformative potential. Meanwhile, the promise of more efficient, transparent, and user-friendly systems has kept AI at the forefront of AP and P2P innovation. The expectations continue to drive investment in ePayables and a focus on optimizing AI’s usage.
Prediction #2 – AI FOMO Helps Accelerate Digital AP Transformations
FOMO (the “fear of missing out”) will run rampant through executive suites in 2025. As the competitive landscape within each industry shifts and intensifies, the fear that AI-powered rivals are poised to gain a significant advantage in efficiency, accuracy, and cost savings (what Ardent is calling “AI FOMO”) will grip the enterprise executives who have been automation laggards. This fear will drive major investments in 2025 in enterprise software, in general, and in ePayables solutions, specifically.
The market will also begin to punish poor market performance that could have been improved by AI. Over the past two years, the penalty for missing quarterly or annual income targets has been steep. In 2025, those enterprises who miss their targets and have delayed automation initiatives will face intense external criticism for failing to reduce operational costs and improve productivity. This criticism will roll downhill from executives to department heads and to AP leaders who missed budget goals because they failed to automate critical AP tasks, such as invoice processing, matching, and approval. Beyond efficiencies, any AP, finance, and procurement executives who experience impactful fraud yet failed to implement any new, AI-driven solutions that could have identified and/or mitigated fraud risk will be in hot water.
AP 2025 BIG Trends & Predictions (Part 3): Next week we’ll explore a new trend and prediction — Solution Providers Go All-In on AI and Expanded RFP Scope for ePayables Solutions, respectively.
