Transforming Contract Audits with AI, Reducing Millions in Potential Overpayments
A leading U.S. utility company manages thousands of vendors contracts each year across large-scale construction and maintenance projects. With a vast network of contractors, invoices, and agreements, ensuring billing accuracy and compliance had become a growing challenge, and a costly one.
Our client’s internal audit team was spending hundreds of hours manually reviewing complex, unstructured documents, comparing vendor invoices to master service agreements (MSAs), amendments, and handwritten field timecards.
This level of manual effort meant the team could audit only 8–10 contracts per year. When findings were extrapolated across the full vendor ecosystem, the organization uncovered tens of millions of dollars in potential overpayments tied to inconsistencies, unverified invoices, and irregular billing terminology.
Key Pain Points:
Our customer knew AI could dramatically improve audit accuracy and speed, but lacked a shared roadmap, clear requirements, and an aligned approach to
safely deploy it.
To support our client’s AI vendor initiative, Synergis placed a Product Manager to
guide structure, governance, and cross functional alignment. Our Product Manager
enabled the organization to move from fragmented effort to a unified, executable
plan.
Cross-Functional Alignment: A Synergis Product Manager unified multiple teams around a single product direction, establishing one roadmap and eliminating the ambiguity that had been slowing the initiative.
Clear Scope and Requirements: Our Product Manager converted complex contract and audit needs into clear product requirements and KPIs, giving engineering precise guidance and ensuring all stakeholders aligned on expected outcomes.
Structured Validation and Governance: Our Product Manager built a repeatable validation process, including human in the loop checks, accuracy thresholds, and release criteria, providing a controlled, low risk way to test and refine the AI model.
Accelerated Delivery and Early Momentum: With alignment, requirements, and governance in place, engineering began delivering faster with fewer reworks, stake holders made quicker decisions, and the AI effort gained a defined path toward MVP readiness.
A Defined Path Toward Scalable AI-Driven Audit Efficiency
With product leadership, governance, and alignment in place, the AI audit initiative is positioned to deliver meaningful operational and financial outcomes.
Increased Audit
Throughput
Our client is on track to scale from auditing fewer than 10 contracts per year to reviewing hundreds, thanks to automated identification of mismatches, exceptions, and anomalies.
Significant Cost
Avoidance
The AI driven validation process is expected to prevent tens of millions in potential overpayments by identifying discrepancies earlier and more consistently.
Standardized
Contract
Interpretation
A consistent, AI assisted workflow reduces manual exceptions and drives cleaner vendor billing practices across the enterprise.
Operational Insight
& Analytics
The effort establishes visibility across vendors enabling the team to identify repeat discrepancies, benchmark contractor behavior, and improve oversight.
Strategic Organizational Impact
- A single, shared product definition with clear governance
- Engineering executing against prioritized, validated requirements
- Leadership able to forecast delivery and outcomes with confidence
- A reusable model for future AI initiatives across the enterprise
The organization has moved from a fragmented idea to a governed,
aligned product effort with direction, accountability, and a roadmap
toward measurable impact.