Brian Nichols

For more than two decades, organizations have been promised that AP automation, RPA, and now AI would finally fix broken Procure-to-Pay processes. Yet many teams are still battling invoice exceptions, manual workarounds, and reconciliation headaches. This interactive lab challenges the software-first mindset and reframes transformation as process as a service, not just software as a service. We’ll outline a real-world P2P challenge: stalled straight-through processing, persistent exceptions, and underwhelming ROI despite multiple automation investments. Participants will then break into small groups to dissect the end-to-end lifecycle, identify root causes of friction, and determine where to “shrink the process” before shifting the tech.

The session will close with a full group debrief to compare approaches and hear how the organization redesigned its P2P foundation to enable sustainable automation, AI, and long-term efficiency gains.