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I’m not saying your implementation is bad or anything but my visceral reaction to this was “I’m glad I’m not on the other side of that”

by JamesSwift19 hours ago|

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Why? It sounds exactly like the design I would hope for. It automates what I'm going to do already without needing to wait. And it allows you to bypass it entirely and just revert to the manual process (along with waiting).

by sholladay19 hours ago|

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That all sounds reasonable until you realize that the same logic is how we ended up with customer support systems that try to walk you through a phone tree and if you are lucky, you will be able to press 0 to speak to a human without answering a bunch of questions first and being referred to the online help articles.

Do you enjoy using any of those systems? Do you want the world to be that way?

by JamesSwift19 hours ago|

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Maybe we are interpreting the GP differently. In this scenario, the phone tree is doing the same questions that the human agent is going to do but does it immediately when I call rather than "waiting for an operator" to ask me those questions. And as long as I can "press 0 to eject" (just like I can in the accounting scenario, then its completely kosher to me.

by stubish9 hours ago|

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No, we end up with crappy systems because people are optimizing to save money over providing a good service. OP has simply replaced the traditional room full of clerks applying policy rigorously with a baysian algorithm and now AI. The management and oversight is still in place, and that is what makes a system that doesn't suck. To make it suck and save money, you remove access to that oversight or just remove it all together. And falling down that slippery slope is not inevitable, even if it sometimes seems like it is.

by KellyCriterion18 hours ago|

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Regarding customer support on phone: I usually have lock with just waiting and not responding to the tel bot, very often you are routed to a human at the end :-D

by mikeyouse19 hours ago|

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In many businesses, the employee is responsible for inputting most of that. If a LLM can get to 95% accuracy and flag exceptions, the employees (and AP team) would actually have less work and bureaucracy.

Though we’ve had a few incidents where employees have submitted AI-generated receipts for reimbursement which is another issue..

by notahacker16 hours ago|

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It's already pretty common for some sort of tool involving some sort of AI to collect receipt data and attempt to categorise them and hook up to your accounts. They also make mistakes, though the advantage of more tractable, less configurable and more limited models is they're unlikely to interpret a prompt as "invent receipts that have never been submitted" or "delete records", as well as trained much more on receipt OCR and less on poetry....

As a business, you've also got to remember that employees are much more likely to complain if the 'agent' or any other form of automation errs by denying their claim or underpaying than the reverse. Depending on the scale of expenses and how likely you are to be audited, the cost of the odd mistake might be more or less than the cost of doing it manually.

by Zopieux11 hours ago|

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Please tell me those are former employees. How can anyone feel confident committing such blatant fraud.

by infecto20 hours ago|

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What is your point? This is pretty normal expense management in any company setting. I don’t know what is so bad about being on the other side of that. Hope I am not too inflammatory by asking what is the point but genuinely you pointed it out like it’s some archaic process flow but it’s part of almost every expense system.

by ofjcihen19 hours ago|

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I guess my current company’s processes may be easier to deal with than others. That or my position affords me some extra catering to.

The system is currently using a simple app to submit expenses and any issues gets a simple human chat request and a call if requested.

They try to avoid kicking anything back and if they do they make sure it’s reviewed first to make sure that it’s needed and to make sure the reason is understood.

Our company is also very large so I’m not sure how they manage but they do. People rave about the process instead of hating it.

by infecto19 hours ago|

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Thanks for the thoughtful reply. To add some color… most expense systems are setup so that the user has to input a couple fields like the category or GL code. Some of the fields might be auto populated. Some companies might not care about the classification but usually the intent is to capture things like travel or software etc. What was described earlier is really not painful for users most of the time but a LLM helps automate so much of it these days.