Senior Data Engineer

AppZen launches Autonomous Cards for ai-based payment controls. How common will agentic payments become, and how fast? Predictions vary, of course, but tech companies are releasing new advances in the autonomous technology almost daily. In the latest example, AppZen early Wednesday unveiled Autonomous Cards, intended for corporate card programs. According to the San Jose, Calif.-based company, the new technology, which is set to become generally available Oct. 26, links to a company's existing payment cards - used for purchasing, fleet operations, or other applications - then applies AI agents to monitor transactions. The agents can automate functions such as detecting suspicious activity, checking transactions against company policy, and reconciling statements. The technology can perform functions related to the transactions while filling in context, AppZen says. This includes addition of details and purpose around the transaction for later reference. The key, AppZen says, is to apply technology that can juggle these multiple factors while the transaction is in progress rather than after it posts. "Our agents continuously monitor spend, understand what was purchased, intervene when necessary, help employees and other transaction owners complete what is needed, and carry each transaction through policy, accounting, and resolution," says Anant Kale, AppZen's chief executive and cofounder, in a statement. "This is not the old card workflow with AI added to it." Cards the service aims at include purchasing cards, ghost cards, virtual cards, and fleet cards, AppZen says, with consideration of transaction type and business context. One key element of the technology, AppZen says, is controlling risk as new cards are added to corporate programs. Human review, when necessary, includes a case report assembled by the program. "Only exceptions that require approval or judgment are routed to people," AppZen says. Overall, Autonomous Cards "is a new operating model designed to make finance teams autonomous while keeping people in control of the decisions that require judgment," says Kale, in a statement. On the consumer side of the autonomous trend, Mastercard said early Wednesday it is expanding Agent Pay to offer more context around transactions initiated by AI. The move will engender more trust in agentic commerce, the card network says. Mastercard has predicted 10% of online shoppers will be using the technology as a matter of routine within four years, with more than 300 million online shoppers around the world adopting it routinely by 2030. The card network's report, "A Short History of the Future of Shopping and Payments," was issued Sept. 8. Field work included surveys of 13,000 parent-and-teen pairs in 13 European countries.

AppZen, an AI-powered finance operations platform, has achieved SAP certification for clean core with RISE with SAP for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. The certification enables enterprises to deploy AI agents across the entire invoice lifecycle whilst maintaining SAP-compliant financial operations. AppZen's Autonomous AP platform uses specialised AI agents to execute accounts payable tasks including invoice intake, document processing, matching, coding, supplier communications and posting. The system integrates seamlessly with SAP S/4HANA, maintaining it as the system of record. Customers have reported up to 90% reduction in manual AP processing effort and 74% faster invoice cycle times. One Qualcomm finance leader noted that agents increased touchless invoice processing from 14.5% to 61.7% whilst reducing manual work by 40%.

AppZen targets accounts payable bottleneck with new AI agent service center. Autonomous finance platform company AppZen Inc. today launched AP Inbox Service Center, a new accounts payable service that deploys eight prebuilt artificial intelligence agents to automate how finance teams handle vendor email. The new service adds agents to AppZen Inbox and converts the product into a structured service center where every inbound vendor message becomes a trackable, auditable request with an assigned status, owner and resolution path. AP Inbox Service Center has been designed to target one of the most persistent capacity constraints in enterprise finance. AppZen argues that while invoice processing has seen heavy automation investment over the past decade, the vendor-facing communication layer has remained largely manual. Payment status inquiries, bank change requests, duplicate invoice resolution, vendor statement reconciliation, W-9 submissions and remittance requests still require team members to read each email, research records, draft responses and route them to the right person. AppZen customer data indicates AP reviewers spend as much as one week a month on that work. The new release take the issues head-on, with eight agents handling a specific scenario end-to-end, from reading the message and looking up records in the enterprise resource planning system to evaluating the request against organizational policy and taking action. Every decision is auditable, showing what the agent evaluated, what it found and why it acted. Templates offered as part of the AP Inbox Service Center cover payment status responses, bank change verification, duplicate invoice detection, vendor statement reconciliation, W-9 compliance routing, purchase order policy enforcement, invoice hold explanations and remittance and proof-of-payment assistance. The bank change agent, for example, escalates every request to vendor management with a risk classification based on domain mismatches, urgency language, unknown senders and process bypass attempts. The agents can be configured and deployed without information technology involvement through the company's AI Agent Studio. Teams describe their processes in plain business language and the system converts those instructions into executable workflows. Templates can be tested with sample inputs before going live and AppZen says that most teams deploy their first working agent in under 30 minutes. Every agent supports a draft-for-review mode in which the finance team makes the final call before a response is sent. When an agent cannot make a confident decision, it defers to a team member. Safeguards include sender identity verification before sharing financial data and masking of sensitive data in outbound communications. "Our customers told us their AP inboxes were one of the biggest capacity constraints in their finance operations," said co-founder and Chief Executive Anant Kale. "We built AP Inbox Service Center so they can focus on the work that requires their expertise, while AI agents handle the volume with the consistency and auditability that enterprise finance demands." AppZen has raised about $290 million in funding, including a round of $180 million in September. Investors in the company include Riverwood Capital Management LP, Coatue Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, 500 Global, Resolute Ventures, Mastercard Inc. and FundersClub Inc. Image: AppZen. A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support its mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE's Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. * 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more * 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni - Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network. About SiliconANGLE Media SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios - with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange - SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI. Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Its new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.