Cirque du Soleil Orchestrates Finance Agility with SAP Business AI-Powered Invoice Assistant
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Key Takeaways
Cirque du Soleil implemented an AI-enabled invoice assistant to streamline accounts payable operations, significantly improving efficiency and response times while reducing manual workload.
The AI solution reduces average handling time for invoice inquiries from 30 minutes to just a few minutes, thereby enhancing supplier satisfaction and allowing finance teams to focus on higher-value tasks.
By leveraging a unified SAP architecture, Cirque du Soleil ensures better integration and accuracy of AI processes within their financial systems, enhancing supplier experience without compromising governance.
Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group has deployed an AI-enabled invoice assistant built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and powered by SAP Business AI, to streamline its accounts payable operations into a faster, multilingual, scalable operation.
With dozens of shows running worldwide and a highly distributed workforce, Cirque du Soleil operates at a scale comparable to many multinational enterprises. That scale brings significant back-office complexity, particularly in accounts payable, where the organization processes tens of thousands of supplier invoices annually.
A large share of supplier inquiries, which were focused on invoice status and payment timing, required manual research before responding. It was a long process that required multilingual communication, and individual follow-ups, often taking up to half an hour per inquiry. As invoice volumes grew, this approach limited responsiveness, strained finance resources, and risked diminishing supplier satisfaction.
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Redesigning Invoice Lifecycle Interactions Through SAP Business AI
To address these challenges, Cirque du Soleil implemented an AI-enabled Invoice Assistant leveraging SAP Business AI, SAP HANA Cloud, and SAP AI Core. Rather than automating a single task, the solution reengineers how invoice inquiries are received, analyzed, and resolved.
Philippe Lalumière, vice president of information technology, Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group said, “The time-consuming research required to identify the payment status of an invoice and its reason was overwhelming. We were looking for a more efficient way to handle this, and SAP Business AI provided us with a simply stunning answer.”
The assistant runs on SAP HANA Cloud, where it stores and processes structured data extracted from incoming supplier emails, along with AI-driven analysis and recommended responses. Built on SAP AI Core, the solution automates key decision logic, allowing the system to assess urgency, interpret sentiment, and identify underlying reasons for payments delays.
Key Benefits and Business Impact
Taken together, the business impact is significant. By automating routine invoice inquiries, the assistant improves operational efficiency and accelerates response times, freeing finance teams to focus on higher value work.
AI-driven analysis reduces the risk of human error and supports timely, contract compliant payments, while built-in bilingual capabilities enable more inclusive engagement across Cirque du Soleil’s global supplier base.
Just as importantly, the solution scales to handle growing invoice volumes without requiring additional resources, delivering a more consistent and responsive supplier experience through standardized, timely communication.
Together, these capabilities reduced average handling time per inquiry to just a few minutes, delivering immediate productivity gains for the accounts payable team.
This finance transformation builds on Cirque du Soleil’s earlier, broader IT modernization journey with SAP, in which the company moved from legacy SAP ECC systems to a more standardized SAP S/4HANA Cloud environment through RISE with SAP. That transition simplified the application landscape, reduced system complexity, and established a cloud-based digital core – creating the foundation required to layer in intelligent, AI-driven capabilities across finance operations.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
Finance teams can scale without increasing headcount. Cirque du Soleil’s use of AI demonstrates how SAP customers can absorb growing transaction volumes and supplier interactions without linear increases in staff. By standardizing responses and automating triage and resolution, AI helps finance organizations maintain service levels during growth, disruption, or peak periods. For SAPinsiders, this reinforces the role of Business AI as a practical tool for building operational resilience into core finance functions.
Unified SAP architecture is a critical enabler. By running AI services on SAP BTP and SAP HANA Cloud, Cirque du Soleil ensures that invoice data, process context, and AI models operate within a single, governed environment. This tight integration improves accuracy, reduces handoffs, and simplifies ongoing optimization. For SAPinsiders, the takeaway is clear: AI delivers the most value when it is deeply integrated with transactional systems, not layered on as a disconnected tool.
AI can improve supplier experience without compromising governance. Cirque du Soleil’s AI use case demonstrates how organizations can respond faster to suppliers while still operating within controlled, enterprise-grade workflows. By standardizing responses and grounding AI output in live SAP data, finance teams can improve transparency and responsiveness without introducing compliance or accuracy risks. For SAPinsiders, this highlights an important shift: AI in finance is not just about speed, but about delivering better external experiences while maintaining trust, auditability, and control.
