Vic.ai debuts AI-powered tool to optimize costs for enterprises

New York-headquartered Vic.ai, a startup that provides a platform to automate accounting and financial processes for enterprises, today announced an AI-powered tool for enterprise-grade cost optimization.

Officially dubbed Spend Intelligence, the offering comes as the latest addition to Vic’s flagship intelligence product designed to provide business and operational insights to help companies improve existing processes. According to the company, the feature will further expand the product, enabling enterprise finance departments to make better, data-backed choices about their costs and eventually improve profits.

“With Spend Intelligence, we continue to push the boundaries of what AI can do for finance,” Alexander Hagerup, CEO of Vic.ai, said. “The spend management insights (from this solution) will help dramatically improve their control over spending across functions and business units.”

Spend Intelligence: How does it work?

The solution, just like other components of Vic Intelligence, uses a proprietary AI algorithm to analyze the cost data of a company and come up with predictive insights as well as a stream of spend reduction initiatives. 

The algorithm learns from the historical spending data of the enterprise – down to the individual line items. Once this process is complete, it runs in real-time on daily spending across invoices and credit card transactions to come up with a detailed spending analysis. Within 30 days of analyzing the data, the algorithm starts producing insights and suggestions.

The output element of the tool includes an insight dashboard that details how much company dollars can be saved through the suggested measures. It also includes benchmarks to help business users understand how their cost structure fares against that of competitors and how their vendor price compares to what other buyers of the same goods or services are paying.

Overall, Vic.ai says this offering can help companies save as much as 15% of their cost base in certain categories and between 2% to 8% of their total existing cost base. 

“In addition to cost reductions, we’ll eventually track and monitor carbon footprint to help companies calculate and reduce CO2 emissions. We look forward to working more closely and more prescriptively, with our customers to pinpoint changes that will translate into significant cost and environmental savings,” Hagerup added.

The new feature is currently active in closed beta and will become available broadly as part of Vic Intelligence in 2023. At present, it provides companies insights such as buying patterns, user and workflow bottlenecks and cycle times.

Since starting in 2017, Vic.ai has been gradually growing its product portfolio to automate time-consuming finance and accounting tasks and free resources for more complex projects. The company counts HSB, Intercom, HireQuest, KPMG, PwC, BDO and Armanino among its customers and has raised over $60 million in funding so far. 

According to an Ernst & Young survey, 53% of finance leaders believe that more than half of finance tasks currently handled by people could be performed by AI over the next three years.