Where to start with AI in the back office
The fastest payback from AI is rarely the flashy use case — it is the repetitive data entry.
When organisations consider AI, the first question is usually whether to build a chatbot. But the clearest returns tend to come from back-office work that repeats every day.
Document reading is the obvious example: receipts, invoices and accounting paperwork follow fairly consistent formats, so AI reads and posts them accurately and takes a large chunk of data entry off the accounting team.
The other category is matching. Pairing job applicants with open roles, for instance — once the database runs into the hundreds of thousands of records, manual screening stops being realistic.
One caution: do not remove people from the process entirely. Always design in a review step, particularly where financial figures are involved.