As Onit Releases InvoiceAI To General Availability, It Promises ‘It’s Not Here to Take Over the World’

Onit today announced the general availability of InvoiceAI, an artificial intelligence product for first-pass invoice review, and along with it comes a clever promotional video that plays on the threat of AI world domination and legal professionals’ ambivalence around AI.

As I reported last May, the Houston company — which provides enterprise workflow products for corporations and corporate legal departments — initially introduced InvoiceAI with limited availability to select customers, promising general availability in the third quarter of the year. 

Right on schedule, Onit today is making InvoiceAI generally available, and also has enhanced the product allow it to review not only historical invoices, but also invoices in real time. 

Onit says that InvoiceAI is trained on millions of legal invoices to detect charges that are potentially noncompliant with a company’s billing guidelines and spend management practices.

It can detect errors that may not be flagged by billing rules, Onit says, looking for common areas of overpayment and charges that typically require correction or clarification, such as nonworking travel, block billing, vague descriptions and work done by improper staff class.

It can then automatically adjust an invoice to comply with guidelines or bring the discrepancy to the attention of reviewers. Since it is AI-based, it is continually learning and improving its results.

“InvoiceAI combs through data for potentially noncompliant charges and integrates with billing rules for corrective action,” said Eric M. Elfman, CEO and cofounder of Onit. “As a result, some customers are discovering up to 20% in savings. And, more importantly, it makes invoice review easier and quicker for today’s busy law departments.”

With the release of InvoiceAI, Onit also released a clever promotional video that seems to take a subtle jab at legal professionals’ ambivalence towards AI.

The release of this product follows Onit’s acquisition in November 2020 of McCarthyFinch, provider of a suite of AI-driven contract management software, followed a month later by its acquisition of AXDRAFT, developer of contract automation software.

Itacquired SimpleLegal in May 2019, four months after private equity firm K1 Investment Management invested $200 million in the company.

Two weeks ago, it acquired Bodhala, a company whose SaaS platform provides in-house legal departments with AI-powered legal spend analytics, benchmarking and market intelligence.

“In all of my decades working with corporate legal departments, I’ve rarely heard in-house counsel say they enjoy invoice review,” Elfman said. “It’s tedious, time-consuming and an area perfectly suited for AI transformation.”

Featured image by rupixen.com via Unsplash.