Since artificial intelligence (AI) exploded onto the technology scene in 2022, organizations have been finding new ways to incorporate AI and generative AI (GenAI) into everyday tasks. A recent McKinsey survey about the state of AI showed that 78% of respondents stated their organization uses gen AI in at least one business function this year, which is up from 72% in early 2024.
These results and other market trends have driven McKinsey to predict the AI/GenAI services market will be worth $200+ billion by the end of this decade.
As organizations increasingly leverage GenAI to improve business processes, what does that mean for billing and revenue management?
GenAI in Action
According to MIT, “generative AI…[is] a machine-learning model that is trained to create new data, rather than making a prediction about a specific dataset. A generative AI system is one that learns to generate more objects that look like the data it was trained on.”
What does this mean? Every aspect of the system’s configuration and functionality is nothing more than specifically formatted text, so a trained AI model can actually do the job of application configuration.
Going one step further, let’s take a look at what that means in terms of potential real-world use cases and business value for implementing GenAI in the billing and revenue management lifecycle:
- Invoice Generation: Extract data from contracts, purchase orders and other relevant documents, and format them according to predefined templates to ensure consistency and accuracy.
- Data Extraction and Entry: Collect data from emails, scanned documents and PDFs and enter it into billing systems, reducing manual data entry, errors and inconsistencies, and speeding up the billing process.
- Error Detection and Correction: Detect anomalies and inconsistencies – incorrect charges or missing information – in billing data and automatically make corrections to improve accuracy.
- Customer Communication: Generate and send billing-related communications, personalized to customers, including payment reminders, overdue notices and detailed explanations of charges.
- Predictive Analysis and Insights: Analyze billing data in real-time using data visualizations to predict trends and provide insights into customer payment behaviors, helping companies manage cash flow and credit risk and track revenue.
- Dispute Resolution: Assist in resolving billing disputes by analyzing previous cases and suggesting potential resolution.
- Regulatory Compliance: Ensure that billing processes comply with relevant laws and regulations by automatically updating billing practices to be and remain compliant with new laws, as well as generate reports and audit trails to prove compliance.
- Dynamic Pricing and Billing: Implement dynamic pricing models through market and customer behavior analyses and adjust billing amounts in real-time based on predefined rules and criteria.
- Integration with Other Systems / Embedded Assistance: Facilitate the integration of billing systems with other enterprise systems, ensuring seamless data flow and minimizing manual intervention. Using embedded assistance can also help navigate to critical reports, saving manual search time.
- Custom Report Generation: Generate customized billing reports based on specific criteria set by the user, providing detailed insights and analytics.
By leveraging GenAI, companies can make their billing processes more efficient, accurate and customer-friendly, ultimately leading to better revenue management and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Unleashing the Power of GenAI
When it comes to billing and revenue management processes, GenAI can significantly streamline financial operations by automating and optimizing various tasks.
Let’s look at this through the lens of an example. If someone in Accounts Payable is looking to build a list or report with past due invoices, it would take multiple clicks through the data to search and filter by accounts that are past due.
But with GenAI, this scenario plays out differently with the AI recognizing a pattern of excessive clicks through the same areas of the application or platform. A business user looking to monitor these accounts can then configure a workflow to automatically notify the appropriate team members that there are past due invoices to address.
In building on this business user’s experience, below are three advantages to applying GenAI to your billing processes:
- Empowering Self-service User Interface (UI) Enhancements
Users can simply describe their desired UI enhancements in plain language and the AI will automatically translate those requests into the necessary metadata changes. This eliminates the need for users to have technical expertise or understand the intricacies of their system’s configuration and allows them to customize the platform to their unique workflows and preferences. Additionally, it reduces the burden on IT teams, which no longer need to handle every feature request manually, freeing up their time to focus on more strategic initiatives.
- Optimizing Business Operations Through AI-Driven Insights
By continuously analyzing user interactions, configuration patterns and business data, GenAI can identify hidden opportunities, suggest innovative enhancements and even predict potential issues before they arise. For example, GenAI could suggest new features or workflows that would streamline specific tasks, enhance productivity and improve the overall user experience.
This ability to generate actionable insights can help businesses make informed decisions, optimize billing processes, improve customer satisfaction and uncover new revenue streams.
- Enhancing Security and Compliance with AI-Powered Monitoring
GenAI can be leveraged to analyze user access patterns and identify any suspicious activity or unauthorized access attempts. It can also monitor data changes and detect anomalies that could indicate tampering or fraud. Additionally, GenAI can be trained to stay up to date on evolving regulatory requirements and proactively identify any potential compliance issues.
The key is that data is what gives GenAI its intelligence. By leveraging your system’s configuration and operational data, AI can automatically and optimally form specific intelligence tailored to your needs to better streamline financial operations. Moreover, the integration of GenAI provides self-service abilities to users that free up IT teams as well as the ablity to improve both security and compliance. Through detailed analysis and predictive capabilities, AI can help organizations better identify patterns and trends in billing data, streamline operations and uncover new revenue opportunities, ultimately providing an even more robust framework for informed decision-making and strategic planning.
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Nathan Shinn , Co-Founder, CSO BillingPlatform
Nathan Shinn, co-founder and chief strategy officer, is an entrepreneur of several successful companies in the last 28 years and is also an engineer with more than 20 years of experience in high-volume, enterprise information systems.
Nathan Shinn
Nathan Shinn, co-founder and chief strategy officer, is an entrepreneur of several successful companies in the last 28 years and is also an engineer with more than 20 years of experience in high-volume, enterprise information systems.
