How AI is transforming work across every department

Every department has its own version of chaos. HR coordinates onboarding across six different systems while new hires wait for access. Procurement manually matches hundreds of invoices to purchase orders. Marketing watches campaigns stall in approval limbo. The workflows are different, but the drain is the same: Manual processes eating hours that should go to actual work, and departments siloed from one another.

At Kuehne Company, a 106-year-old water treatment provider, the solution was an AI-driven portal that handles everything from IT support and laptop procurement to ERP modification approvals. Since adoption, emailed service requests dropped 90% and issue resolution accelerated 73%. The three-person IT team finally had bandwidth for projects that had been on hold for years.

"We lacked a lot of visibility, which caused delays or even duplicative work," says Daniel Rodrigues, system administrator at Kuehne. "I would be working on something while another member of the team would be working on the same thing without us really realizing it."

AI automation addresses these challenges by doing what email chains and spreadsheets can't: handling routine tasks automatically, routing work to the right people, and providing real-time visibility into status. This allows onboarding processes to flow smoothly from HR to IT and security without the need for manual handoffs, so new hires can start being productive on day one. It manages purchase orders to auto-match against invoices, so that finance teams stop chasing paperwork. And it helps approvals flow through a single system instead of six tools, so campaigns launch on schedule.

“Complexity is a hidden tax on every department. When teams spend hours on manual handoffs and status updates, that's time they're not spending on work that actually moves the business forward. AI automation eliminates that tax,” says Murali Swaminathan, Freshworks CTO.

Read also: How long should your AI transformation take? Longer than you think.

Efficient onboarding

Roman Rylko, CTO at software development company Pynest, says adopting AI automation has slashed the time needed for onboarding new hires in half.

“Before ESM, the process was truly chaotic,” he says. “HR, IT, security, and the employee’s manager were all scrambling to provide access to repositories, chats, laptops, and accounting systems. Now it's all one service: A new employee is created, and the AI ​​agent for the role and project automatically assigns tasks to departments and ensures that all steps are completed.” 

An added benefit: Adopting a service management tool and automating processes forced each department to document and formalize their part of the onboarding process, says Rylko, allowing it to become more consistent and efficient across the entire company.

Automating vendor management

Festoon House relies on a network of 120 international suppliers to deliver party lighting products to more than 400 retailers across Australia. Before AI automation, one person at Festoon was responsible for matching purchase orders, receipts, and invoices from all of those vendors, ensuring that the right products were received and the correct payments were made. 

Three years ago, the company began using AI-powered automation to integrate its ERP and CRM databases, according to founder and managing director Matt Little. Now, every purchase order is sent to each supplier automatically using the correct EDI format. When supplier invoices are received, the system verifies purchase order details against delivery and invoice data. If the data matches, the system schedules payment and updates inventory. If it doesn’t match, or the supplier has other compliance issues, the system halts the payments and kicks the invoice up to the finance department for resolution.

“Since implementing this process, we’ve virtually eliminated the risk of making accidental non-compliance payments while also decreasing the time needed to process accounts payable by 66%,” says Little. “The ability to automate multiple areas of our company’s operations has enabled us to redirect our internal resources from maintenance to growth.”

Ending approval bottlenecks

“Our digital team was drowning in bottlenecks,” says Ivan Vislavskiy, co-founder and CEO of Comrade Digital Marketing Agency. “Feedback and approvals were bouncing between Google Docs, Slack, Gmail, Asana, Notion, and Teams. Creative approvals were slow, campaign launches stalled, and we couldn’t test fast enough.”

The agency consolidated everything into a single workflow automation system, incorporating project management and generative AI platforms to automate tasks, approvals, reminders, and first drafts. The firm also built a portal where clients could log in and get instant status updates on their projects.

Average turnaround time on campaigns dropped from 11 days to 3.

“AI didn’t just automate tasks,” he adds. “It gave our marketers actual breathing room to focus on strategy instead of chasing checkboxes.”