Vision and Strategy
Designing an AI-Native Financial Decision Workspace
What if software assembled itself around the problem a user is trying to solve? Rather than forcing users to navigate dashboards, reports, and workflows, what if they were given a workspace containing the exact context, data, and artifacts needed to make a decision?
Role, scope & impact
- Design originated project
- I’m responsible for product and design outcomes
- Assembled a business case based on user research from working capital, pitched it to executive leadership team and secured approval for the work stream
- Designed an ephemeral UI experience to help with financial decision
Financial decisions do not live inside one product surface
Deciding on how much to borrow, from where, and how does not happen in isolation. Businesses settle on working capital sources when they are in the midst of planning, when they are thinking about payroll, upcoming bills, or delayed customer payments and they stitch together multiple sources of data to get all the insights they need to make an informed decision.
Traditional product architecture was getting in the way
Traditional CRUD-based interfaces are bound by product architecture. Users have to navigate pages, menus, and reports, just to gather the materials they need to make a decision. That structure works for linear workflows, but it breaks down when the user is trying to make a decision that cuts across multiple artifacts.
Getting directional alignment from leadership
To get leadership alignment before exploring a unified capital and planning vision, I quickly created a rough functional prototype that integrated Finmark's planning capabilities with personalized working capital offers using:
- React.js
- Functional forecasting and scenario planning logic.
- CSV/spreadsheet upload so real business data could be used in testing
The learning: entry points were not enough
Testing with this prototype with real user data prompted high-value feedback from users:
- Product architecture still limited usefulness of Finmark
- Trust takes time and needs to be earned
Designing the dynamic workspace canvas
The dynamic decision workspace is a temporary UI that is composed around a financial decision. It does not behave like a permanent dashboard. It does not require users to know where a feature lives. It appears when there is a meaningful problem to solve, pulls in the relevant data and artifacts, supports the user through analysis and action, and then goes away once the job is complete.
The workspace has two primary surfaces:
- The first is a natural-language workspace where users can ask complex financial questions, transform data, inspect assumptions, and bring in context that may exist outside of BILL.
- The second is a canvas where the system assembles the artifacts needed to make the decision: forecasts, invoices, bills, repayment terms, recommended actions, scenario tables, audit trails, and supporting evidence.
Context based on the entry point
One of the most important interaction principles in the prototype was that the user should never land in an empty workspace. Entry points can be pre-assembled or be invoked by the user.
Trust is a part of the architecture
The workspace has to make reasoning visible by default. If the system recommends financing invoices, delaying payments, using a credit line, or changing a payment schedule, the user needs to understand why. They need to see the source data, the assumptions, the tradeoffs, and the risk.
Users should be able to manually verify every simulation, suggestion and recommendation. This is a key lever to start earning trust in high-stakes decision making.
Governance is built in
Permissions and secure sharing built-in at the entity level for accountants and consultants to review and provide guidance
Audit trail
Regulatory oversight compliant audit trail built into each decision workspace to eliminate need for manual audit trail logging
Making the canvas work outside BILL
If a user is already working in Slack, Google Sheets, Google Docs, email, ChatGPT, Claude, or another business tool, they should still be able to invoke BILL’s intelligence from there. The user should not have to stop what they are doing, open BILL, land on the dashboard, navigate to a workflow, and manually rebuild the context. With the dynamic workspace, external tools could pass the user intent and context into BILL. After authentication, the user could be dropped into a pre-assembled canvas.
Next steps
The current prototype is being tested against cash flow scenario use cases, where BILL detects a potential gap, assembles a workspace with the relevant invoices, bills, forecasts, and financing options, and helps the user evaluate the best next step.