Artificial intelligence keeps shaking up every corner of business, and finance teams are finally getting some real relief after years of fighting clunky software. Same. Sameer Gulati, who started Ordway and now runs it as CEO, knows exactly how painful those old systems can be. He spent more than twenty years jumping between big names like Intacct, Workday, and Zuora. Every stop showed him the same mess: slow billing, angry CFOs, and way too much copy-paste work. In 2018 he got fed up and built Ordway from scratch to fix it.
We sat down with him recently. He explained where finance automation is heading, why AI actually matters this time (not just marketing talk), and how regular finance people can start using these tools without wanting to throw their laptops out the window.
Sameer Gulati’s Path to Founding Ordway
From Programmer to Pioneer in Finance Automation
Sameer started coding straight out of college over 25 years ago. Pretty soon he figured out he liked building stuff for finance folks more than anything else. He joined Intacct when it was still tiny—one of the first cloud accounting companies. Watching companies ditch those old on-premise servers felt like magic back then.
Later at Workday he helped grow the accounts payable and receivable pieces. At Zuora he lived through the crazy early days of the subscription boom—think Netflix and Salesforce changing everything. Everywhere he went, the story stayed the same. CFOs kept complaining about rigid billing rules, manual invoices that took forever, and month-end chaos that made everyone stay until midnight.
One day he just said, “Enough.” Ordway was born in 2018 with a simple goal: make the whole invoice-to-cash flow run by itself so finance teams could go home at five o’clock like normal humans.
The Role of AI in Transforming Finance Automation
How AI is Changing the Finance Landscape
Old finance software was stiff. You wanted a tiny change in a report? Good luck finding a developer who had time. Or you ended up copying numbers into Excel at 2 a.m. again. AI actually fixes that boring stuff.
Now someone can just type, “Hey, show me how much ARR we might lose next month” and boom, the answer pops up. No SQL, no waiting three days for IT. It feels like having a super-smart intern who never sleeps and never gets the numbers wrong.
Moving Beyond “AI-Native” Features to True AI Integration
A lot of companies slap a ChatGPT box on their old software and call it “AI-native.” That’s cute, but it’s not the real thing. Real integration means the whole platform was built from day one to watch what you do, learn from it, and start handling things on its own.
At Ordway they keep pushing for what Sameer calls “100% hands-off.” The dream is that one day you only touch the system when something truly weird shows up—maybe once a quarter instead of every single day.
Practical Applications of AI in Finance Teams
Intelligent Automation Behind the Scenes
Picture this: a sales rep closes a deal on Friday afternoon. Instead of the finance guy spending twenty minutes clicking through screens to build the contract, he just types, “Make a 12-month contract for Acme Corp, starter plan, 10% discount because they paid upfront.” Ten seconds later the contract is ready, signed, and the first invoice is already out. That actually happens inside Ordway today.
Or think about month-end. One customer we talked to cut their close from 12 days down to 2 days just because the system spots weird journal entries before anyone else does. Little things like that add up fast.
The Evolution of Billing and Revenue Tools
There are probably fifty billing tools out there. Most do one thing okay and everything else badly. Ordway went the other way—they built one platform that can do simple one-time invoices, complicated usage billing, annual contracts with ramps, whatever. And because it’s API-first, companies plug it in without throwing away their existing CRM or ERP. That matters more than people think.
The big promise everyone wants? Zero-day close. Sounds crazy, but some Ordway customers are already closing books the same day the month ends. No more “we’ll get accurate numbers next week.”
Common Misconceptions About AI Integration
The Limits of “Plug-and-Play” AI
Way too many leaders think they can just connect to OpenAI and call it a day. Finance doesn’t work like that. One wrong decimal in revenue recognition can cost millions. The system has to understand your chart of accounts, your rev-rec rules, your tax setups. Generic AI spits out scary mistakes—ask anyone who’s seen it “hallucinate” a $400 million invoice that never existed.
Ordway checks everything twice, shows you what it wants to do, and lets you click yes or no. Trust beats clever every time in finance.
AI’s Role in Productivity, Not Job Reduction
People always freak out that AI will steal jobs. Sameer laughs and points to factories: robots didn’t end manufacturing, they just moved people from dangerous assembly lines to better-paying jobs running the robots. Same thing here. Finance teams at Ordway customers aren’t shrinking—they’re handling twice the revenue with the same headcount and actually enjoying work again.
The Future of AI in Enterprise Software
A Vision for the Future of Work
Sameer gets this big smile when he talks about the future. He wants something like Jarvis from Iron Man—except for revenue instead of missiles. You walk into the office, the system already knows three customers are late paying, one contract needs a price increase, and ARR grew 4% faster than forecast. It already sent the dunning emails, drafted the amendment, and booked the revenue. You just sip coffee and handle the two things it wasn’t 100% sure about.
That future is closer than most people think. Maybe three to five years, not twenty.
Ordway, with Sameer Gulati at the wheel, is making finance work feel less like punishment and more like a normal job again. By mixing rock-solid automation with smart AI that actually understands money, they’re letting companies close books faster, bill accurately the first time, and let finance people think big instead of fixing typos all day. The ride has just started.
