CASE STUDY
What the AI-enabled invoice assistant does
• Reads and understands invoice-related emails in all languages
• Identifies inquiry type and extracts invoice details
• Determines payment status and root causes of delays
• Analyses sentiment and urgency
• Generates bilingual draft responses for faster resolution
For the accounts payable team, this volume created growing pressure. Nearly 40 % of incoming inquiries came from vendors asking about invoice status, payment timing or discrepancies. Each inquiry required manual research across systems, often with limited visibility, resulting in delayed responses and frustration on both sides.
The challenge: Manual effort, limited visibility
Before automation, responding to a single invoice inquiry could take up to 30 minutes. Team members needed to search for invoice data, verify payment status, understand exceptions and craft responses, often switching between languages depending on the supplier.
With 38 shows running simultaneously across cities around the world, Cirque du Soleil’ s operational footprint rivals that of a multinational enterprise. creativity, logistics and constant motion, the solution is helping finance operations perform with the same precision as its worldfamous acrobatics.
A global operation that never stands still
With 38 shows running simultaneously across cities around the world, Cirque du Soleil’ s operational footprint rivals that of a multinational enterprise. Its workforce of nearly 4,000 artists and staff representing 80 nationalities supports resident shows, touring productions and creative studios, each with unique vendor relationships and financial processes.
Behind the scenes, that scale translates into significant financial complexity. Cirque du Soleil processes more than 70,000 supplier invoices annually, many of them from tour-supporting vendors who rely on timely payments to keep productions running smoothly.
As invoice volumes increased, so did the risk of delays, inconsistencies and employee burnout. Cirque du Soleil recognized that maintaining agility would require a fundamentally new approach, one that could scale without adding headcount.
Turning to SAP Business AI
To address these challenges, Cirque du Soleil partnered with SAP to deploy an AI-enabled invoice assistant powered by SAP Business AI.
The assistant automates the entire triage-andresponse process for invoice-related emails. Incoming messages are automatically analyzed, regardless of language, and categorized by request type. The system extracts relevant invoice details, determines the invoice status and even analyzes sentiment, enabling urgent or frustrated inquiries to be prioritised.
Once the analysis is complete, the assistant generates a proposed response in both English www. intelligentcio. com
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