By Aaron Wentzell, VP of Technology & Innovation, Bits In Glass
Ask any accounts payable team where their week goes, and you’ll hear a familiar story. Invoices arrive by email in every imaginable format. Someone opens each one, keys the data into the ERP, hunts down the matching PO, chases the requester when something doesn’t line up, and routes it for approval — all before a single payment goes out the door. It’s slow, expensive, and the kind of work that makes good people want to do something else for a living.
When Boomi launched its first AI Agent Hackathon in early 2025, my team at Bits In Glass set out to tackle this problem head-on. The result was the Invoice Assistant: an AI agent built on Boomi Agentstudio that automates invoice handling from the moment an invoice lands in the inbox to the moment payment is queued. It won the hackathon, and it’s now available as an accelerator on the Boomi Marketplace.
The problem isn’t invoices. It’s everything around them.
Most AP teams have already invested in an ERP. Many have OCR tools. Some have approval workflow platforms bolted on. And yet the work is still manual, because the connective tissue between those systems is human.
A clerk receives the email, opens the PDF, and decides whether the line items match the PO, whether the vendor is on file, whether the amount is within tolerance. When something is off — and something is always off — a clerk drafts the email to the vendor, follows up, and reconciles the response.
Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of invoices a month, and you have a process that’s expensive to run, hard to scale, and nearly impossible to audit cleanly. That’s the gap the Invoice Assistant was designed to close.
What the Invoice Assistant does
The agent runs quietly in the background, polling a dedicated inbox every 15 minutes. When an invoice arrives, it:
Ingests the Invoice
and uses OCR to extract the invoice number, amount, due date, and vendor information.
Validates the data against your ERP
checking the vendor record, comparing line items, and confirming the amount falls within tolerance.
Routes clean invoices forward automatically,
queuing them for payment with no human touch required.
Flags exceptions for review
with a clear, side-by-side breakdown of what didn't match and provides a pre-drafted email the AP team can send to the vendor with one click.
Notifies the team in Slack
and opens tickets in your existing ITSM platform so nothing falls through the cracks.
The design principle is simple: humans should only see the invoices that genuinely need a human decision. Everything else moves on its own.
Why This Matters
When we talk to AP and finance leaders, the conversation rarely stays focused on processing speed for long. The deeper value lands in three places.
Faster cycle times unlock real money.
Every day shaved off invoice processing is a day closer to capturing early-payment discounts and a day further from late-payment penalties.
Exception handling stops being a bottleneck.
Most AP teams spend a disproportionate share of their time on the small percentage of invoices that don't match cleanly. By auto-resolving the easy ones and giving humans a structured workspace for the hard ones, the Invoice Assistant changes the math on what an AP team can handle without adding headcount.
Audit readiness is built in, not bolted on.
Every action the agent takes is logged. Every exception, every match, every escalation is traceable. For finance leaders preparing for audits or tightening SOX controls, that audit trail is often the quiet feature that closes the deal.
Why Boomi Agentstudio makes sense
We evaluated several platforms before settling on Boomi Agentstudio. Three things stood out:
Time to production (a working agent in weeks, not quarters, with real data flowing through it),
Enterprise readiness (out-of-the-box connectors for ERPs, ticketing, and communication platforms meant no custom integration project for each system),
Governance (the controls, observability, and policy enforcement finance leaders need before they’ll turn AI loose on payment data).
Boomi Agentstudio lets us focus on the business problem instead of the mechanics.
See it in action
The Invoice Assistant is available now as an accelerator on the Boomi Marketplace. If you’d like to see it run against a sample invoice set or talk through what it would take to deploy in your environment, we’d love to connect!
- May 12-14, 2026
- Hyatt Regency Chicago
- Booth #112
And if Accounts Payable isn't the workflow keeping you up at night, take a look at our broader library of accelerators.
We’ve built them to tackle the small, nagging, high-friction problems that quietly drain time across the enterprise — the ones that rarely make the strategy deck but consistently make the workday harder.
Aaron Wentzell is VP of Technology & Innovation at Bits In Glass, a global boutique intelligent automation consulting firm and Boomi partner. Bits In Glass was named a winner of Boomi’s 2025 AI Agent Hackathon for the Invoice Assistant.
