How US Small Businesses Use AI to Collect Unpaid Invoices (1:41 film)
An animated INTERCOL film: an Austin supplier lets her AI assistant chase invoices unsupervised, it negotiates with her customer’s AI and gives away 20%, and a human collector gets the $74,000 back.
Chapters
Transcript
Maria runs a pump-and-valve supplier in Austin, Texas. Customers love her parts. Paying for them is another story: one hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars, outstanding. So Maria asked AI for help. It drafted clean invoices. It kept her records straight. It checked every billing line. And it wrote reminder emails faster than she could read them. Locally, it worked. Dallas paid. Houston paid. Even the guy in El Paso paid. So Maria switched collections to full autopilot... and went fishing. Her biggest customer, a distributor in Monterrey, owed seventy-four thousand dollars. And it had an AI too. The two assistants got along beautifully. Forty-eight emails. A twenty percent quality discount. One hundred and eighty days to pay. And free shipping on the next order. Maria: "It gave away WHAT?!" Nobody had complained about quality. Not once in four months. So Maria called INTERCOL. Sofía read the thread, pulled the signed delivery receipts, withdrew the discount, and called the finance director. Directly. Sofía: "¿Señor Treviño? Sofía, de INTERCOL. Tengo aquí sus recibos de entrega... firmados." (I have your delivery receipts here... signed.) Treviño: "¡Ah! Sí, sí, claro... ¡Pagamos hoy mismo!" (Ah! Yes, yes, of course... we'll pay today!) Seventy-four thousand dollars. Paid in full, by Friday. Automate the paperwork. Keep a human on the money. INTERCOL. No cure, no pay.