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Accounts payable inboxes can see 1,000+ vendor emails a day. Xelix’s new Helpdesk turns that chaos into structured tickets, enriched with ERP data, and pre-drafted replies—complete with confidence scores.
In this episode, Claire Smid (AI Engineer), Emilija Gransaull (Back-End Tech Lead), and Talal A. (Product Manager) walk us through how they scoped the problem, prototyped with “daily slices” (Carpaccio-style), and built a retrieval-first pipeline that matches vendors, links invoices, and drafts accurate responses—before a human ever clicks “send.” We dig into tricky bits like vendor identity matching, Outlook threading, UX pivots from “inbox clone” to ticket-first views, and the metrics that prove real impact (handling time, stickiness, auto-closed spam). We close with what’s next: targeted generation, multiple specialized responders, and more agentic routing.
Show Notes
Guests
- Claire Smid — AI Engineer, Xelix
- Emilija Gransaull — Back-End Tech Lead, Xelix
- Talal A. — Product Manager, Xelix
Key Takeaways
- Start narrow to win: pick high-volume, high-cost requests (invoice status & reminders).
- Enrichment > magic: accurate replies come from great retrieval/matching, not just a bigger LLM.
- Design for adoption: familiar inbox view helps onboarding, but a ticket-first UI unlocks AI features.
- Measure outcomes, not vibes: track “messages sent from Helpdesk”, % auto-resolved.
- Confidence builds trust: show match quality and response confidence so humans know when to edit.
Chapters
0:00 Meet the Team: Claire, Emilija, and Talal
00:36 Introduction to Xelix and Its Products
01:08 Understanding Accounts Payable Teams
01:37 Help Desk Product Overview
03:11 Challenges Faced by Accounts Payable Teams
04:03 AI Integration in Help Desk
05:47 Automating Reconciliation Requests
07:45 Development Methodology: Carpaccio
09:11 Prototyping and Beta Testing
12:00 Manual Tagging and Data Collection
16:39 Focusing on High-Impact Use Cases
18:55 User Experience and Interface Design
24:56 Pipeline Architecture and Email Processing
28:21 Data Enrichment Challenges
29:04 Handling Vendor Identification
33:33 Email Thread Management
36:15 Generating Accurate Responses
40:48 Evaluating System Performance
49:20 Future Developments and Goals
Full Transcript
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