An AI engineer inside one portfolio company at a time, starting with AP and close. Ramp, Stampli, Bill.com, and your ERP's own AI all automate parts of finance. Each portfolio company still needs someone to choose, connect the ERP, and prove it on real invoices. We place a senior engineer with the controller to do that.
Bring a month of AP volume and the name of your ERP.
Published results in PE portfolios
One mid-market finance team and one large investment fund, with what each rollout required.
Ollie's controller says daily review of variances between purchase orders and invoices went from four hours to minutes with Stampli.
A two-way NetSuite sync for POs, vendors, and accounts, agreed variance ranges so in-range invoices skip re-approval, and an AI assistant trained to map vendor invoice wording to Ollie's SKU names.
NBIM employees surveyed reported saving more than 20% of their time on Claude-assisted analysis and operations tasks.
A two-week pilot, 50 employees trained as internal AI ambassadors, and MCP connections into Snowflake and internal systems. 600+ active users within two months.
Figures as reported by the vendor or customer at the linked source. They are not OpenNash results.
Where our engineer comes in
Ollie's result depended on a two-way NetSuite sync and variance ranges someone had to agree with the controller. A portfolio company with a lean finance team rarely has an engineer free for that. Ours takes a company laptop and read-only ERP access, sits with the controller and AP lead, and makes the technical calls with the CFO.
| Decision | What we look at | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Which workflow goes first | Invoice counts, cycle time, exception rate, and staff hours across AP, AR, close, and customer operations, measured in week 1. | A ranked list with the hours at stake in each. You pick. |
| Buy a tool or build | Whether Ramp, Stampli, Bill.com, or Coupa already does the job with your ERP, what it costs at your volume, and what you would give up. | If a product fits, we recommend it and do the integration. If none does, we build. |
| Which model, and where it runs | Accuracy on your own invoices, cost per document, and whether your data may leave your cloud. | Chosen on test results, and changeable later without a rewrite. |
| What the agent may touch | ERP permissions, payment release, and vendor master data. | Read-only until the pilot passes. Payments and bank details always stay with a person. |
Why forward-deployed engineers
Built for their largest accounts, deploying their own models. OpenAI's deployment company launched with more than $4B. ↗
Configure their own product, priced per seat or per resolution.
A small senior team, ex-Palantir, Meta, and Databricks. Any model, any vendor. Free pilot, then a flat monthly fee.
Even OpenAI closes the gap with engineers in the room. Source: OpenAI, What FDE means at OpenAI, Oct 2026.
The first eight weeks
Written down with your team in week 1. The pilot is free, and it has to pass these before anything goes further.
Example acceptance tests, not results from a customer deployment. Yours are written with your team.
Systems we work in
Rules from day one
FAQ
The company does. Code, prompts, test cases, and integrations transfer with it, and any engineering team can run them.
No. The pilot runs on read-only access. Writeback comes after the pilot passes, through a scoped service account and an approval step.
We report time saved, cycle time, and exceptions against the week-1 baseline. Your finance team separates released capacity from realized savings and nets out running costs.
We run one workflow at a time. When a second company runs a similar stack, the integration code and test cases from the first carry over.
Why you need one
A senior engineer joins your team on a laptop you issue, tests the options on your data, and puts one PE portfolios workflow into production in 4 to 8 weeks. It starts with a free 14-day pilot judged against test cases you agree in writing.
After launch, we run and improve the workflow on a flat monthly fee, or your team takes it over. The code, tests, and runbook are yours either way.
Bring a month of AP volume and the name of your ERP.