GenAI takes the pain out of pricing for Deluxe

It’s said that what you don’t know can’t hurt you—but that’s not strictly true. When you’re a global payments provider like Deluxe, processing more than $2 trillion in payments annually, what you don’t know can limit your ability to innovate.   

That’s particularly true when it comes to contractual obligations, as Kari Mesick can attest. As a Business Lead in Deluxe Treasury Services, Mesick and her team are responsible for a range of product-related issues across the company’s business-to-business payments arm—pricing included.  

“I needed to make a pricing adjustment, but it was for a large group of clients, and I didn’t have an easy way to look up contractual restrictions at a client-by-client level,” said Mesick. “I couldn’t easily see the details on notification requirements. I needed to know if there were caps on what we could do. I also needed to confirm if we needed their consent to make a change.” 

The good news was that Deluxe already had the answers to those questions. The bad news was that they were embedded in more than 900 lengthy and highly complex legal documents. “It’s not just contracts,” said Mesick. “There are master service agreements, amendments, addendums, statements of work, all kinds of documents.”   

To solve a similar situation the year before, Mesick had to “pull 10 people away from their jobs for two weeks.” Even then, they were quickly reading contracts and manually inputting information into a shared spreadsheet. “The data was OK, but it wasn’t consolidated, and it certainly wasn’t consistent.”   

Determined to find a better option, Mesick took on the challenge to Srinivas Nagarajan, VP, Product and Operations at Deluxe. That led to a conversation about UiPath—and the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities embedded within the UiPath Document Understanding™ tool.  

Working closely with qBotica—a Platinum Certified UiPath Partner known for its award-winning UiPath implementations—Mesick found the right answers.   

qBotica provided extensive support, leveraging its expertise in automation and AI to ensure a seamless integration and implementation of the solution. qBotica’s unique automation as-a-service offering meant Deluxe not only embraced the full potential of the UiPath Platform through its implementation and ongoing support skills, the partner also built a model to drive continuous discovery of new automation opportunities. 

AI and automation deliver rapid results 

“The kind of information that Kari needed typically requires an excruciating amount of manual effort,” said Nagarajan. “It isn’t just the volume, but the fact that the documents are filled with complex, unstructured information. Fortunately, this is where technology like generative AI shines.” 

It’s fascinating to have AI in the mix. Initially, it was very intimidating, but the PoC was a real eye-opener in terms of just how easy it can be to get value out of artificial intelligence. 

Kari Mesick, Business Lead, Treasury Services 

Leveraging both specialized and generative AI, Document Understanding is one of the key products within the UiPath Business Automation Platform™. It extracts, interprets, and processes data across everything from PDFs and images through to handwriting and scans. Moreover, the embedded generative AI capabilities mean that extraction models don’t have to be pre-trained. Instead, teams can simply write prompts within Document Understanding—just like asking ChatGPT a question—to surface the required data in seconds.  

What really intrigued us were the generative AI capabilities within UiPath Document Understanding. How it could understand and find key words within contracts, and how we could tweak those keywords through simple prompts. That’s powerful.  

Srinivas Nagarajan, VP Product and Operations 

“Training AI models from scratch would have been hugely expensive and incredibly time consuming,” said Nagarajan. “Using generative AI, we didn’t need to. The necessary pricing attributes could be extracted immediately—giving us a 99% faster time to value for the solution.” 

The generative capabilities of Document Understanding made it easy to adjust the information using natural language. “We’d just change the prompt, much like we’d ask a person to look for something different,” noted Nagarajan.   

“We pointed Document Understanding in the direction of the client documents we wanted to focus on, and told it what information we were looking for,” Mesick explained. “It pulled the relevant agreements from Salesforce, analyzed them, and gave me a paragraph-long summary of what I needed to know within just a couple of hours.”  

From there, things moved fast. “That PoC was built in March, and by April we were in full production,” added Mesick. As a result, Deluxe saved over 800 hours on this single process alone.  

Removing the data barrier 

Document Understanding delivered the information the team needed at an astonishing speed—but there was more to it than that. “The information was much more consistent,” said Mesick. “We were able to validate it using the Action Center within UiPath. And we were so confident in what we saw that we streamlined our planned governance meeting for the project.”  

The success of the combination of automation and generative AI has been such that Deluxe plans to extend the use of Document Understanding.  

For Mesick, it’s about taking things to the next level with contract management: “For some clients, we might have 10 or more agreements, and there can be modifications made between those documents. We’re looking at how we can use Document Understanding to help us quickly understand which of those is current and correct.” 

Nagarajan, meanwhile, is focused on tackling other use cases with automation. “There are a number of opportunities that we want to pursue—including onboarding customers faster, automating our billing and invoicing processes, and automating order entry,” said Nagarajan. 

As both are quick to point out, though, the work they’ve done so far will continue to deliver value long into the future. “The work we’ve done here isn’t specific to this set of contracts,” said Mesick. “It can be expanded beyond it. This has taken away the data barrier on pursuing new opportunities, and that’s huge for us.” 

With UiPath, we don’t have exhaust our workforce with manual efforts. We are now energized, eager to engage, and ready to deliver great customer experiences.   

Kari Mesick, Business Lead, Treasury Services