Extropy on AIR: Finance Transformation, AP Automation & AI in Finance

Ravit Gutman, Founder & CEO of Extropy Advisors, and Mike Jasper, VP of Extropy Advisors, recorded this one between sessions at Basware’s VIP and NextGen customer event in Dublin. Both had been hearing the same thing from finance leaders all day: what they want most is each other.

Ravit and Mike talk about why people keep coming back to events like this. Attendees come to build a network of peers they can call when they hit a wall, and many are stepping up as ambassadors of change inside their companies. They also talk about what was missing for leaders who went through an implementation without a community, and why it helps to know that change gets harder before it gets better.

In the second half, they get into what sets Transforming Out Loud apart. It’s a practitioner-led community built around people, process, technology and purpose. They also explain why benchmarks only help when they come from peers whose processes look like yours.

Read the full recap: https://extropyadv.com/find-your-community-basware-dublin/
Join Transforming Out Loud: https://extropyadv.com/apply/

For twenty years, shared services and BPO were built to scale people. Now AI can do much of the transactional work those models were designed around. So what happens next?

Ravit Gutman, Founder and CEO of Extropy Advisors, welcomes back Bo Senu-Hodo, who leads global invoice-to-pay transformation at a multinational pharmaceutical company. Fresh off speaking at SSON in San Diego, Bo shares how she manages an outsourced AP team in the age of AI. She covers why you have to standardize before you automate, how her team saved more than 15,000 hours with AI-enabled OCR, and why a BPO dashboard full of green boxes doesn't tell you the real story.

In this episode:

• Why your BPO is an extension of you, not the driver of your transformation
• Fixing the process foundation before adding AI
• "Agents execute, humans govern": how the human role is changing
• Measuring outcomes instead of volume and SLAs
• What an AI-ready vendor partnership looks like
• Whether to bring outsourced work back in-house

Chapters:
00:00 Welcome and the shared services paradox
02:04 What changed on the floor at SSON
05:01 Who should drive BPO transformation
08:02 From automation to autonomy: standardize first
10:41 Agents execute, humans govern
15:56 Global processes vs. country requirements
19:18 Measuring BPO success beyond the scorecard
28:30 Build vs. buy: vendor statement reconciliation
31:47 ServiceNow and the Tetsu virtual agent
34:38 Aligning APAC teams on success
37:07 What makes a partnership AI-ready
46:41 The human side and new value centers
50:23 Should work come back in-house?
52:55 Lightning round
55:28 The one takeaway

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France's e-invoicing mandate went live on September 1, 2026, and it's just the first wave. Slovakia, Norway, Germany, Portugal, Spain, the UAE, and the UK all have mandates landing in 2027 and 2028, and most multinational AP/AR teams aren't ready for what's different about each one.

In this episode, Mike Jasper (VP, Extropy Advisors) and Akanksha Birjuka (Project Manager, Extropy Advisors) break down what's live now, what's coming next, and the details that trip up global finance teams every time, from grace periods that offer zero protection if you haven't started, to a German invoicing rule that flips how AP teams are used to working.

What we cover:
03:10 - Why e-invoicing compliance always moves in waves, and why 2027 is the next one
06:45 - The France rollout number nobody's talking about (only 20 of 150+ accredited platforms were actually tested)
09:53 - The grace period myth: why "no penalties until 2027" doesn't protect everyone
14:56 - Slovakia's surprising paper-invoice loophole
21:34 - Norway: the only country where businesses asked for the mandate to come sooner
26:33 - Germany's ZUGFeRD rule that catches AP teams off guard (hint: the PDF isn't the legal invoice)
38:16 - UAE's October 2026 deadline hiding in plain sight

Plus what's ahead for Portugal, Spain, and the UK, and three things every global AP/AR team should be doing right now regardless of jurisdiction.

This is public regulatory information, not tax advice.

Read the full country-by-country breakdown at extropyadv.com

Somewhere right now, someone in finance is logging into their 14th vendor portal of the day, copying passwords out of a spreadsheet, downloading invoices one by one, and racing a shutoff deadline they can't see coming.

In this episode, Ravit Gutman and Mike Jasper dig into SmartFetch, the AI agent built after watching a healthcare client's team manually download hundreds of invoices a month across just one utility portal. Mike explains how SmartFetch logs into vendor portals, telecom accounts, and shipping platforms, grabs invoices the moment they post, and delivers them straight to your payment system, fully tagged with account number, amount, and bill date.

Ravit then puts Mike through a myth vs. fact round covering the questions every AP team asks before automating this kind of work: Does it store your passwords somewhere risky? Will it get your accounts locked out? Can it really pull from hundreds of portals with a single login?

And will you actually know if something goes wrong?

Along the way, they share how one client scaled invoice volume by 40%+ without adding a single AP hire, and why this problem is bigger than AP alone.

If someone on your team is still running the portal marathon every morning, send them this one.

Extropy CEO Ravit Gutman and VP Mike Jasper hit pause at the midpoint of 2026 to grade what they got right (and wrong) back in January. Agents went from trade show demos to running quietly in the background of everyday finance work.

Anthropic and OpenAI both launched enterprise deployment arms within 72 hours of each other. And new data shows 78% of organizations have deployed AI in at least one business function, with finance teams among the most active adopters.

But the execution gap hasn't closed. 81% of finance departments have tried AI in some form, only 14% call it a successful transformation.

Ravit and Mike break down what's driving that gap, what the EU AI Act's August 2 deadline and France's e-invoicing mandate mean for finance leaders, and make their predictions for the back half of the year, including one bold call about AI and a material financial error.

Tune in for a clear-eyed midyear check-in, no hype, just what's real.

Most strategies don't fail because they're wrong. They fail because organizations can't execute them.

In this episode, Mike Jasper sits down with Extropy Project Manager Cecile Brown-Smith to unpack the systematic forces behind that gap. They explore why entropy quietly erodes even the best-laid plans, how ambiguity stalls teams and kills momentum, and why the people closest to the work are often left out of the rooms where decisions get made.

From tribal knowledge to missing legal sign-off, the execution gap is rarely dramatic. It's dozens of small breakdowns that pile up until the project is already off course.

Tune in for a practical conversation on what it actually takes to convert strategic intent into daily behavior, and why structure, clarity, and the right people in the room make all the difference.

Growth is supposed to be a good thing, so why does it make everything harder?

In this episode, Kevin Zirkle and Mike Jasper unpack the tension between speed and structure, and why scaling faster than your systems can support is one of the fastest paths to corporate entropy.

They break down what "scaling before stabilizing" really looks like, why speed is a multiplier for both good and bad, and what it actually takes to design for sustainable velocity.

If your organization is growing but things feel increasingly chaotic, this one is for you.

Most SAP Cloud ERP migrations treat Accounts Payable as an afterthought. That's a mistake that costs organizations years of lost value, compliance fines, and a core that's anything but clean.

In this episode of Extropy On AIr, host Ravit Gutman sits down with Jason Kurtz, CEO of Basware, to break down why the calls you make about AP during your migration window will shape how your finance function performs for the next decade.

They get into the real reasons nearly 60% of SAP migrations run over budget or behind schedule, why a specialist AP layer actually protects your clean core instead of adding complexity, how Basware's AI is built on 2.5 billion processed invoices and what that means for touchless processing, what compliance-as-a-service looks like when over 100 global mandates are actively shifting, and why "we'll deal with AP later" is the phrase finance leaders come to regret most.

If you're a CFO, CIO, Controller, or transformation lead anywhere near an SAP program right now, this one is worth your full attention.

In this episode, Kevin Zirkle sits down with Steve Ramirez, a senior manager at Extropy who lived these challenges firsthand on the client side before joining the team.

Together, they dig into something most transformation conversations skip: where entropy actually originates. Not from bad leadership or poor execution, but from silos that started as solutions, incentives that were never aligned across functions, and slow drift that happens between the moments of intentional change.

If your organization feels like everything is getting harder without one clear reason why, this one's for you.

Most organizations don't know their systems are failing until something very visible and very costly goes wrong.

In this episode of Extropy On AIr, Kevin Zirkle and Mike Jasper break down the five telltale signals of organizational entropy: exception dependency, shadow systems, decision escalation, metric conflict, and hero dependency.

The uncomfortable truth? These don't look like problems. They look like people doing their jobs. That's exactly what makes them so dangerous.

If you're a leader trying to get ahead of dysfunction before it becomes a crisis, this episode gives you a practical lens for seeing what's hiding in plain sight, and a simple place to start this week.