7 Reasons to Invest in AR Automation in Today’s Economy

For businesses navigating the current economy, accounts receivable (AR) efficiency can be the deciding factor between staying financially resilient or becoming the next casualty of economic instability. Here are seven compelling reasons why investing in AR automation is more urgent and more rewarding than ever.

1. Financial Hits are Counteracted by Stronger Cash Flow

Cash remains king, and today’s volatile conditions demand fast access to liquid assets. In fact, 59% of CFOs are actively building their cash reserves to weather continued market unpredictability and new tariffs. This is where AR automation makes a tangible impact:

• Accelerated Velocity of Cash Deposits: AR automation has been shown to accelerate invoice payments by over 40%. How? By streamlining the entire invoice-to-cash cycle, from faster, more accurate invoice delivery to offering convenient digital payment options and automating reminders for overdue payments.
• Enhanced Liquidity: Financial liquidity is the gold-standard strategy for remaining financially resilient in the face of volatility, particularly as it relates to market demand or unexpected expenses. Your AR team, equipped with AI-powered automation, can become the operational arm that effectively boosts your company’s cash flow, ensuring you have the funds you need when you need them.

Financial liquidity is the gold-standard strategy for remaining resilient in the face of economic volatility.

2. Bad Debt Can Rise 250% During Downturns

Economic downturns invariably lead to an increase in payment delinquencies, bad debt and other defaults. During the 2008 recession, credit and collections losses rose by a staggering 250%. We are already seeing warning signs; last year, bad debt write-offs doubled, totaling $20.00 per $100,000 of sales. We could easily see that figure rise due to a more difficult economic environment.

Credit and collections teams act as frontline defenders. However, to respond responsively, they need more than traditional spreadsheets and manual email follow-up activities. This is why improving collections efficiency is more critical today. AI automation turns reactive collections into a proactive strategy. Here’s how:

• Targeted Dunning Strategies direct AR teams to prioritize high-risk accounts. AI leverages trends intelligence, using past payment behaviors to design smarter follow-up operations with automated workflows. This ensures that your team focuses its energy on accounts that require the most attention, significantly improving collection rates and minimizing write-offs. Get best practices for AI-powered collections.
• Agentic AI Email capabilities are better suited to handle overflowing collections inboxes, categorize incoming messages, and draft personalized responses up to 10x faster than manual processes. Automated procedures help your team know what to say, when to say it, and through which channel to maximize on-time payments. Learn more about Billtrust’s groundbreaking Agentic AI abilities.

Together, these activities can increase collections effectiveness and other key performance indicators. After implementing the Billtrust Collections solution one Corporate Credit Manager noted the following:

“We’re now seeing accounts that we have never contacted before proactively contact us and make payments sooner. As a result, our number of past-due accounts is decreasing.”

Corporate Credit Manager, Building Products Distribution Company

3. Economic Headwinds Actually Increase AR Demands

Economic downturns can actually increase the demands on AR teams. With trends in inflation and tariff policies, many buyers are purchasing more goods and services in an attempt to hedge against future price hikes. Higher volumes of invoices and payments can mean more pressure on AR teams. Operational excellence can make all the difference in managing more throughput as AR teams need to accelerate their order-to-cash processes.

Manually managing this surge can overwhelm even the most dedicated AR teams, leading to possible errors, delays, and increased costs – whether it’s more overtime or more postage and printing costs. AI for AR automation expands scalability and the capacity needed to handle these increasing demands without overburdening the workforce:

• Automated data management handles remittance data capture and cash application volumes without headcount increases. Machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR) technologies eliminate the manual work associated with data collection, entry, and reconciliation activities needed to match payments against invoices with precise accuracy.
• Automated invoice delivery removes the majority of the manual work needed to present invoices to a variety of client AP portals. Corporate B2B buyers and high-value customers are increasingly requiring invoices to be uploaded into their AP portals. This has created a new explosion of time-intensive work. But modern AR platforms are integrated with hundreds of AP portals, thus freeing internal teams from satisfying this requirement by hand.

4. Proactive Risk Management Requires Predictive Analytics and Financial Market Intelligence

Research shows that the companies better suited to face economic headwinds are those that take preventative measures to protect their financial health. In fact, an overwhelming 97% of financial leaders have specific preparations at-the-ready when a downturn strikes.

Preventative AR measures require proactive approaches supported by the power of predictive analytics. To anticipate and predict financial risks, AR departments need the ability to assess more areas of risk more frequently, which means tapping into a larger data set more often. You can’t prevent problems without tools that reveal forward-leaning trends at both the micro (customer) and macro (market) levels.

AI delivers these predictive insights, notifying you in real time about potential issues before they have a chance to escalate. AR automation platforms provide clear visibility into credit score shifts, changing buyer behavior trends, and forecasted cash shortfalls. Here’s a few examples:

• Early Anomaly Detection: Spot unusual shifts in cash flow patterns—whether sudden spikes in late payments or unexpected credit usage. Platforms that also have AR market intelligence can also compare your activity to broader norms, giving you a clearer perspective and allowing you to intervene before small issues become big problems.
• Market‑Driven Forecasting: Combine your own receivables data with wider economic indicators (like average payment terms) to produce more accurate cash‑flow projections and stress‑test scenarios against real‑world volatility.
• A Fresh View into Peer Benchmarking: Understand how your Days To Pay metrics, collections efficiency metrics, and cash‑flow velocity measure up against peers in your industry in today’s environment—so you can pinpoint areas for improvement and validate best practices even as they evolve with the changing times.

AR automation provides visibility into credit score shifts, changing buyer behavior trends, forecasted cash shortfalls, and broader trends in the market.

5. 2026 is the Year of Autonomous AR and the Cost of Ignoring It is Real

The future isn’t on the horizon; it’s already arrived. Autonomous AR, powered by Agentic AI, has crossed the chasm of autonomy. This means disruptive change isn’t off in the distance but a real opportunity unfolding right now. Agentic AI, often referred to as “AI agents,” enables specialized virtual assistants to collaborate across your AR ecosystem. They can:

• Coordinate actions across invoicing, collections, payments, credit, and cash application.
• Autonomously plan, make decisions, and execute tasks to achieve predefined goals, taking AR efficiency to an entirely new level.
• Deliver intelligent, collaborative responses without relying solely on human intervention.
• Act on your behalf, using aided or unaided automation. This ensures you stay in control with explicit approvals before assistants are allowed to act alone. Read the eBook “AI Assistants are Now Autonomous: The New Era of AR is Here.”

Starting early is critical in reaching full autonomy, because the AR team needs time for training and confidence building before an AI assistant can be trusted to act alone. Thus, rapid adoption is the secret to building the type of fast-acting innovation that generates a material competitive advantage – that type of real result that every executive wants.

According to Deloitte, 25% of companies using Generative AI are already experimenting with these autonomous technologies, and by 2027 that number is expected to double. AI is no longer emerging—it’s here. And it’s mainstream with McKinsey reporting that 72% of businesses are now using AI, up from just 50% in recent years. Furthermore, 59% of the companies already exploring or deploying AI are accelerating their rollouts and increasing their investments, according to the IBM Global AI Adoption Index. Gartner reports that finance functions have largely closed their AI adoption gap.

Anyone taking a wait-and-see approach risks being left so far behind so quickly that catching up becomes nearly impossible.

6. Proven ROI: New Research Shows You Won’t be Disappointed with an Investment in AR Automation

Still skeptical? The data speaks for itself. Studies consistently show that businesses are not disappointed with their investment in AR automation, achieving significant returns and operational improvements.

7. With Fast-Moving Changes this Year, AR Teams Need to Run Faster

Most AR teams are so buried under mismatched data, manual reconciliations, and administrative workloads that shifting into a strategic mode is simply not an option. This is the crux of the issue. Do you have the time to generate the necessary financial insights when you’re bogged down processing the next batch of incoming checks? Do you have the AI finance tools to generate financial health insights with the click of a button?

Adapting to shifting economic conditions demands agility in AR—a challenge that only the best AR platform can meet. For instance, advanced AR automation software can support you with:

• AI-Powered Dashboards that provide real-time visibility into key metrics like Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), Collections Effectiveness Index (CEI), customer payment behaviors, and cash flow forecasts, empowering your team to make data-driven decisions and improvements.
• A Conversational Interface that uses large language models to generate insight – think ChatGPT for AR. This way you get instant answers and trending data from your own buyer data. Plus, with Billtrust, you get insights from the largest data network in the industry. Real-time payment data from 13M+ buyers across 1M+ companies enables you to receive targeted recommendations for digital adoption and payment policy optimization.
• Agentic AI Assistants can multiply your workforce. For example, Billtrust’s Autopilot is your always-on, agentic AI assistant delivering answers to your questions, configuring alerts, defining KPIs, and suggesting next-best actions in real time.