Zone & Co has announced a new AI Assistant for its Zone Billing solution. Zone Billing enables NetSuite customers to manage complex billing requirements for their organisation. It can deal with subscription billing to complex international contracts. Including multi-currency, multi-tier, and usage-based billing for a combination of products and services.
The new AI Assistant will enable users to ask questions in their natural language. Thus obtain contextual answers without leaving the Zone Billing instance. The Assistant will leverage the Zone Billing Knowledge Base and external resources. Markedly the purpose is to ensure that workers increase efficiency and can work within a single solution.
The new tool supports multiple languages, though Zone & Co does not indicate which are supported. Zone & Co has developed the solution and states that no customer data is used to train the AI models. Therefore the approach ensures that the AI assistant is aligned with Zone Billing’s SOC 1, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 accreditations.
Hylke Sluis, CTO of Zone & Co., commented, “Embedding AI into Zone Billing enables our customers to be more efficient and deliver high-value insights at unparalleled speed. Customers get better value when tailored insights are presented within the application, in the context of their workflow. We believe enterprises will gain unprecedented efficiency by leveraging the automation embedded and will empower all users to tackle their most pressing problems immediately.”
The Zone Billing AI Assistant is currently available for early-access customers and will be generally available later in the autumn. To leverage this new feature customers should upgrade to the latest version of Zone Billing first.
Zone & Co strengthens AI capabilities
The AI Assistant is just the latest AI solution that Zone & Co has delivered. In November 2023, Zone & Co announced a generative AI capability for Zone Capture. This feature automatically populates data from vendor bills.
The solution is more than a simple OCR engine. It is able to interpret the bill and recognise where data fits on the accounting system. Therefore it will populate that data accurately, saving hours for AP staff. The platform continuously improves as users correct and adjust.
The Gen AI will not insert data in fields where it is unsure. Therefore users can set parameters to alter thresholds to determine whether it will act.
Thomas Kim, CEO of Zone & Co., added, “Our vision is to redefine how finance teams operate by integrating intelligent automation at every level of their workflow, and we see this as just the beginning. We are committed to empowering businesses to achieve greater efficiency through technology that scales their workforce and ERP. This AI Assistant is a major step forward in our long-term AI strategy, helping companies reduce manual processes, streamline operations, and unlock new potential for growth.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
There is little detailed information about what the new generative AI is capable of. No examples were given of the questions that users could have asked. Subsequently, for users looking to obtain information about their revenue streams, this could be a very useful feature. It will certainly reduce the time spent in generating reports.
It will be interesting to see the use cases that customers emerge with. Will the AI Assistant be able to generate analytical insights into the data that it has access to? If Zone & CO follows the same process that they did with Zone Capture, there should soon be videos available to see what it does.
