Most finance teams still inspect a sliver of company spend after the fact. Oversight sells a different bargain: watch every transaction, find the odd ones early, and let human auditors spend their time on what actually looks wrong.

Anant Kale built AppZen around an unfashionable question: who checks the paperwork after software makes it easy to submit? Fourteen years later, that question sits at the center of the argument over AI, judgment and the future of finance work.
AppZen built its business around an unglamorous but expensive corporate blind spot: the receipts, invoices and card charges that finance teams cannot inspect one by one. Now its AI is moving from flagging suspicious spend to resolving the work itself - while leaving the company’s existing finance stack in place.