The French division of Manpower, one of the largest recruitment and staffing companies in the world, has deployed an AI agent developed by Sidetrade to help optimize credit management in its financial department.
The software, called Aimie, has passed the probation with flying colors – after nine months of testing, effectiveness of recovery actions grew 12 percent – and is now handling thousands of accounts.
“We started Aimie off with two customer portfolios for a period of two months,” said Laurent Bueno, credit director of Manpower France. “Encouraged by the results, we ramped up our use of Aimie. Within four months, Aimie was managing nearly 60 percent of single-site customers, which represents over 5,000 accounts, and nearly 10,000 follow-up actions per month.”
Manpower France has an annual turnover of €4 billion and collects 1.3 million receivables from 80,000 companies. It has been working with Sidetrade since 2013.
Sidetrade, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, is a specialist in automation for financial departments, and has been increasingly moving into the AI space.
The company says its tools helped liberate staff at Manpower from repetitive labor, while also achieving a significant reduction in days sales outstanding. Deploying Aimie is the latest step in this relationship: the software agent had been trained on 230,000,000 B2B payment experiences, totaling sales of over €700 billion over the past three years.
Thanks to this knowledge, Aimie can analyze individual accounts to determine the best collection strategy, according to criteria such as buyer and seller profiles, characteristics of the invoice, and business relations history, including any disputes.
“Our solution, like all automation software, was based on a set of predetermined scenarios, which needed to be regularly revised by business experts. On top of this, Sidetrade added Artificial Intelligence, which exploits the profusion of data available on customer payment behavior, to provide financial teams with the best possible recommendations in real-time,” commented Jean-Cyril Schütterlé, chief product officer at Sidetrade.
“With over 700 payer centers to manage, it is impossible for a manager to call all the debtors in their portfolio. Aimie helps them decide which customers to contact first,” Bueno explained. “We dismiss any alarmist talk about Artificial Intelligence. We actually see AI as a way to let us focus on real human know-how.”
Source at AIBusiness
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