Preparing governed accounts payable workflows for approvals and payments

Everyone's convinced AI is about to wipe out accounting jobs, but that's not the full story.

These jobs were already vanishing, and AI had nothing to do with it.

The Wall Street Journal found that more than 300,000 accountants left the profession between 2019 and 2022. That's before ChatGPT existed.

A 17% drop, mostly mid-career people who just walked.

They left over pay, burnout, and workload. In the surveys, salary, heavy workload, and work-life balance all land around 49% as the reason people quit.

And almost nobody is replacing them. Accounting grads just hit a 20-year low.

AP is the worst of it. The most manual seat in accounting: keying invoices, chasing approvals, re-checking the same vendors every month. The first job people burn out of, and the hardest one to keep filled.

Here's the part people have backwards. AI is the only thing that makes these seats worth staying in.

Take the manual grind off the people you have, and the job changes. Less data entry, more review. Less chasing, more judgment. The same team handles more, catches more, and spends its time on the work that actually needs a person.

You don't fix a talent shortage by finding people willing to do tedious work. You fix it by deleting the tedious work.

That's what we're building.

Pleo has launched a suite of AI agents to automate spend management, AP, and accounting workflows, allowing finance teams to focus on strategic tasks. Beta testing begins in July 2026.

Read: https://t.co/TOzMEd9zZZ

#Pleo #Fintech #AI #AgenticAI #SpendManagement

Claude’s new financial services release shows how powerful AI in finance is becoming. It also highlights what finance teams still need around it.
The ability to analyze data, work across documents and spreadsheets, draft outputs, and support complex finance workflows is genuinely impressive. For small businesses, solo operators, and lean finance teams, this can already be a major unlock.

But when we speak with finance teams in larger and growing companies, we hear a consistent pattern: they are excited about AI, but the real need is not just better analysis. It is getting finance work done safely, reliably, and with the right controls.

Finance teams tell us that the hard part is often connecting the right context: accounting data, approvals, budget ownership, CRM inputs, tax rules, entity-specific logics, and manager decisions. They also want AI outputs they can inspect, verify, and approve before anything consequential happens.
That distinction matters. AI can prepare, check, summarize, and recommend. But when the next step affects a payment, reimbursement, approval, accounting treatment, audit record, or ERP write-back, companies need more than a smart assistant. They need a governed finance workflow layer.

That is where the next phase of AI in finance will be won: connected data, encoded business logic, permissions, approval flows, audit trails, and human control over consequential actions.
Finance teams should start now. The best place to begin is with workflows where AI can safely prepare the work, while the company builds the operating layer needed to execute with confidence.

The companies that benefit most will be the ones that start learning now. Not by handing over consequential finance decisions on day one, but by putting AI into real workflows, understanding where it creates leverage, and building the controls needed to scale it safely.

How do you think about this? Would love to hear more thoughts

🚀 And check out how Moss can support you on that journey! 🚀