From inbox overload to every email cleared.
Your AP team spends hours switching between the inbox and your ERP to answer supplier queries, with no signal of what to prioritise until each communication is opened.
SoftCo AI Inbox reads each communication, finds the invoice, payment, or purchase order behind it, and prepares a response your team can review and send.
See AI Inbox in action
Supplier inquiry communications per week in one mid-market AP team
Of team capacity consumed by communication handling in that same AP team
Year-on-year invoice volume growth while AP headcount falls
Featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for AP Automation
The inbox grows. Control doesn't.
Invoice volume is rising 28% year on year while AP headcount falls. Every supplier communication lands together, with no signal of what needs attention first, who owns it, or what happens next.
Search first. Reply second.
Before your team can reply to a single supplier query, they open the ERP, search the supplier, find the invoice, check the status, return to the inbox, and draft a reply. Repeated all day, every day, this is the model that absorbs most of the mailbox's cost.
Loudest wins, not costliest.
With no prioritisation signal until each communication is read, the AP Manager works the exception that escalated, not the one that costs most. Workload is invisible, coaching is impossible, and the CFO gets a gut-feel report instead of data.
Unanswered queries, supply holds.
Suppliers place buyers on hold when queries go unanswered. One mid-market AP team linked over €600,000 in late payment fees and interest in a single year directly to mailbox overflow and slow query resolution.
Harder to control as volume climbs.
64.3% of AP professionals report team stress from delayed processes, and 41.4% report damaged supplier relationships as a direct consequence. A shared inbox was never designed to handle this volume with no structure behind it.
Every communication understood before your team opens it.
Generic inbox tools know a communication arrived; they can't tell you what to do about it. SoftCo AI Inbox reads each communication, finds the invoice, payment, or purchase order behind it, and drafts a response your team can review and send. Because it works from your live AP process, not the communication text alone, it understands why suppliers are chasing you.
Before drafting anything, AI Inbox classifies and deduplicates what's arrived, then routes it by type and risk tier. Bank detail change requests always go to mandatory human review, with no AI-generated response permitted. Every reply your team sends starts as a data-grounded draft, not a blank page.
Every case owned, tracked, and visible.
From the moment AI Inbox goes live, every supplier communication creates a managed case with an owner, an SLA state, and a full audit trail. The AP Manager sees SLA compliance, first response times, workload distribution, and query trends without waiting for a supplier escalation to reveal what is happening. Only 9% of AP teams describe their metrics measurement as extremely effective. AI Inbox gives the AP Manager the data to change that.
See AI Inbox in actionSLA tracking, configurable per query type.
Set different SLA thresholds for different query types. High-risk cases route to the AP Manager within four hours. Standard cases route to the clerk within 24.
Every action attributed. AI and human alike.
Every action taken on a case, whether by AI or by a team member, is recorded and attributed. AI and human actions are governed to the same standard.
Spot the risk before it reaches the CFO.
Ageing cases, SLA breaches, and workload imbalances surface in the dashboard before they escalate. The AP Manager coaches with evidence instead of guesswork.
Purpose-built for teams like yours. Not scaled down.
AI Inbox is designed for AP teams like yours, running a shared inbox with meaningful supplier query volume. When combined with SoftCo AP automation, it ships as a single bundle, evaluated together rather than pieced together.
For new SoftCo customers, there is no separate integration project. AI Inbox connects to the existing ERP integrations used by the AP automation platform through a context-consumer architecture: read-only access, no ERP write-back, and no modification to your existing systems.
Implementation is designed to take weeks, not months, though we treat that as a direction of travel, not a committable number.
Email arrives. Gets read. Cleared.
AI Inbox works through four steps from the moment a supplier communication arrives to the moment your team sends the response, with human approval at every step that matters.
Communication arrives and gets classified.
AI Inbox reads each supplier communication and works out what it is: a query, an invoice, a credit note, a statement, or a bank detail change request. It deduplicates across channels so the same communication doesn't generate separate cases.
AP-process data found and context built.
AI Inbox works from the structured AP data the platform already holds, not raw communication text, finding the invoice, payment, or purchase order behind the communication. This is what allows it to prepare a grounded response rather than a generic one.
Case routed by risk and SLA tier.
Each case routes to the right person at the right SLA tier. High-risk cases, including all bank detail change requests, go to the AP Manager with no AI response permitted. Standard cases reach the clerk with a draft ready to review.
Team reviews, approves, sends.
No response sends without explicit team approval. Your AP team stays in control of every communication that leaves the business, with AI handling the groundwork and your team keeping the judgement calls.
Frequently asked questions
1. How does AI Inbox decide what to do with a supplier communication?
Every communication is classified on arrival using a three-tier routing model: High, Medium, or Low priority. The classification draws on structured AP data, not the words of the incoming communication alone. High cases route immediately to a named owner. Medium cases generate a context-aware draft for human review. Low cases are handled without manual intervention. Every action, regardless of who or what took it, records an actor_id to the same audit standard.
2. Does AI Inbox connect to our ERP?
AI Inbox works through SoftCo AP automation, which is configured to your ERP environment. SoftCo has been deployed across Oracle Cloud, JD Edwards, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and Infor, among others. The AP data AI Inbox reads comes from your live AP system, so responses are grounded in the same data your team works with every day, not a separate data layer.
3. Can it handle supplier communications in multiple languages?
AI Inbox supports multiple languages. If multilingual supplier communication is a specific requirement for your organisation, raise it early in the conversation so we can confirm that the scope applies to your deployment.
4. How does AI Inbox connect to our AP system?
AI Inbox is built inside SoftCo AP automation. When combined with SoftCo AP automation, it activates on top of your existing AP go-live. There is no separate parallel implementation. The connection to your AP data is direct because AI Inbox and the AP platform share the same data foundation.
5. Is AI Inbox available as a standalone product?
AI Inbox is designed to work at maximum value when combined with SoftCo AP automation. Its responses draw on live AP data, including invoice status, approval position, payment terms, and dispute history. Without that data foundation, the inbox is a communication tool. With it, your team can understand the context and prepare the next step. If your primary interest is AP automation, AI Inbox is part of that conversation.
6. How quickly does AI Inbox activate after go-live?
AI Inbox is designed to activate fast, from the point your SoftCo AP automation is live. The exact timeline depends on your environment and configuration, and we will validate that in your deployment rather than quoting a number upfront. What does not change is that day one is not a phased rollout: every case is owned, tracked, and routed from the start.
Every supplier communication, ready to clear.
From day one, every supplier communication creates a managed case with an owner, an SLA, and a full audit trail. Your team starts each query with a data-grounded draft instead of a manual ERP lookup.
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