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Add Invoice Verification Agent blog post (CFO Living Examples, Part 2)
Unlisted for review: live at /blog/invoice-verification-agent/ but not linked from the landing page or part 1's "More writing" yet. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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‎src/pages/blog/invoice-verification-agent.astro‎

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---
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import BaseLayout from '../../layouts/BaseLayout.astro';
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---
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<BaseLayout
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title="Your AP Agent Knows Who's at Fault: ~/stubborncoder"
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description="What changes when an AI agent 3-way matches every invoice, separates vendor-caused problems from internal ones, and routes each to the right person."
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activeLink="writing"
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>
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<section class="post-hero">
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<div class="post-hero-bg"></div>
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<div class="post-hero-overlay"></div>
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<div class="post-hero-content wrap">
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<a href="/#writing" class="post-back reveal">&#8592; Back to writing</a>
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<div class="post-meta-top reveal">
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<span>April 2026</span>
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<span>&middot;</span>
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<span>8 min read</span>
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<span class="series-badge">CFO Living Examples</span>
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</div>
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<h1 class="reveal">Your AP Agent Knows<br><span class="em">Who's at Fault</span></h1>
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<p class="post-subtitle reveal">
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Most AP mistakes look like vendor problems. Half of them aren't. An agent that
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can tell the difference changes who gets the email, who gets the memo, and who
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pays for the error.
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</p>
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<div class="post-tags-row reveal">
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<span class="post-tag post-tag--ember">AI Agents</span>
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<span class="post-tag post-tag--gold">AP Automation</span>
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<span class="post-tag">3-Way Matching</span>
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<span class="post-tag">CFO Office</span>
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<span class="post-tag">Autonomous</span>
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</div>
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</div>
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</section>
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<main class="wrap">
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<article class="article">
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<div class="series-intro reveal">
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<span class="series-label">CFO Living Examples, Part 2</span>
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<p>A series exploring how AI agents change the daily reality of finance teams. Not theory: working systems you can try.</p>
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</div>
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<h2 class="reveal">The overnight problem</h2>
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<p class="reveal">
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Between the time AP closes on Friday and reopens Monday, invoices stack up and
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quietly cost you money. A 2/10-Net-30 invoice that slips past day ten is real cash
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left on the table. A duplicate sneaks through because it came from a different
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email address. A 7% price variance gets rubber-stamped because the clerk was
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clearing a 200-invoice queue. A cost center blows past its quarterly budget and
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nobody notices until month-end.
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</p>
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<p class="reveal">
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The Invoice Verification Agent closes that gap. It runs in <strong>continuous cycles</strong>:
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read invoices, 3-way match against POs and goods receipts, detect issues, assess
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materiality, draft the right response, and hand clean invoices to the payment
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queue. Every cycle. Every invoice.
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</p>
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<h2 class="reveal">How it makes decisions</h2>
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<p class="reveal">
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The agent works in three layers, in order.
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</p>
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<div class="policy-grid reveal">
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<div class="policy-row">
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<span class="policy-days">Layer 1</span>
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<span class="policy-action">3-way match</span>
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<span class="policy-desc">Invoice line vs PO line vs goods receipt. 2% price tolerance, exact on quantity.</span>
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</div>
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<div class="policy-row">
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<span class="policy-days">Layer 2</span>
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<span class="policy-action policy-action--amber">Issue detection</span>
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<span class="policy-desc">Price mismatch, quantity mismatch, duplicate suspect, missing PO, missing receipt, budget threshold.</span>
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</div>
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<div class="policy-row">
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<span class="policy-days">Layer 3</span>
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<span class="policy-action policy-action--warn">Responsibility</span>
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<span class="policy-desc">Vendor, internal, mixed, or informational. Drives who gets contacted.</span>
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</div>
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</div>
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<p class="reveal">
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Layer three is the one that matters. A price mismatch is <em>vendor-caused</em>, so
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we ask the vendor to fix it. A cost center blowing its budget is <em>internal-caused</em>,
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so we escalate to the CC owner and the vendor never hears about it. A missing PO
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is <em>mixed</em>: maybe procurement forgot to create it, maybe the vendor shipped
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without one. Different paths, different emails, different people.
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</p>
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<blockquote class="reveal">
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<p>Most AP automation treats every exception the same way. Classifying who's actually responsible is the difference between "useful" and "doesn't embarrass you in front of vendors."</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p class="reveal">
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Once the issue is classified, the reasoning layer picks one of five actions per
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invoice, with a materiality judgment and a plain-English rationale:
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<strong>approve</strong>, <strong>request_correction</strong> (vendor-facing),
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<strong>hold_pending_internal</strong> (internal only, vendor stays out of it),
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<strong>reject_to_vendor</strong>, or <strong>reject_internal</strong>. Safety
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overrides catch the obvious failure modes: it can never approve an invoice with
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blocking issues, and it can never reject to a vendor before a human has reviewed
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it internally.
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</p>
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<h2 class="reveal">What it actually does for your team</h2>
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<p class="reveal">
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This isn't a dashboard that flags exceptions and waits for someone to deal with
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them. The agent acts:
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</p>
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<div class="takeaway reveal">
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<div class="takeaway-label">Autonomous actions</div>
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<ul>
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<li><strong>Runs a 3-way match</strong> on every invoice line. Green, yellow, red per line, inline in the UI.</li>
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<li><strong>Detects and reasons about issues</strong> with per-issue evidence: the detection logic, the data excerpt that triggered it, and the materiality call.</li>
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<li><strong>Drafts vendor correction emails</strong> that are concrete, not bracketed templates. PO numbers, line references, EUR amounts filled in.</li>
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<li><strong>Drafts internal memos</strong> for issues the vendor shouldn't hear about: budget overruns, duplicate-invoice investigations, procurement gaps.</li>
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<li><strong>Builds an approval routing tree</strong> per invoice. Tier 1 (cost center owner), Tier 2 (+ AP manager), Tier 3 (+ Finance director), rendered as a live diagram you can click through.</li>
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<li><strong>Clears clean invoices</strong> straight to "ready to pay" and hands them off to the payment agent, no human in the middle for the boring 80%.</li>
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<li><strong>Surfaces early-payment discount opportunities</strong> with the savings math and days remaining on the discount window.</li>
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<li><strong>Tracks cost avoided</strong>: the sum of overcharges the agent caught across price variance, quantity variance, and duplicate exposure, separate from discount opportunities.</li>
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</ul>
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</div>
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<h2 class="reveal">The audit question</h2>
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<p class="reveal">
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Every CFO asks the same thing: <em>"Can I trace what it did and why?"</em>
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</p>
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<p class="reveal">
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Yes, and AP adds a twist the auditor will appreciate. Every issue carries its
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<strong>detection logic</strong> (for example, "price variance 7.14% exceeds 2%
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tolerance") and the <strong>evidence</strong>: the PO line, the goods receipt,
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the invoice row. Ask why vendor X was contacted on April 3rd and you get back
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the exact match result, the exact issue, the exact rationale, and the exact
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email that went out. Drill-down, not summary. That's what survives an audit.
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</p>
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<h2 class="reveal">Why local inference</h2>
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<p class="reveal">
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An AP cycle fires more model calls than a collections cycle: one assessment,
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potentially one vendor email, potentially one internal memo, one routing tree
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per invoice. Multiply by thousands of invoices a month and cloud API costs stop
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being a footnote. Running the model on local hardware keeps the economics sane
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and, as a bonus, keeps supplier-specific pricing inside the perimeter, which
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matters more for AP than AR.
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</p>
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<p class="reveal">
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This is a design choice, not a religion. The same architecture runs against a
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top-tier cloud model if you'd rather pay for latency and quality and trade
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some data-residency flexibility. The agent consumes structured output, it
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doesn't care where the structure comes from.
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</p>
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<h2 class="reveal">Beyond AP</h2>
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<p class="reveal">
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The loop behind this agent, <em>detect, classify responsibility, decide, act, log</em>,
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is not specific to invoice verification. It maps onto any finance process where
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the hard part isn't spotting the exception, it's figuring out who owns it:
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</p>
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<p class="reveal">
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<strong>Expense auditing.</strong> Master-data quality. Vendor onboarding
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compliance. Intercompany invoice matching. T&E policy enforcement. Same cycle,
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same architecture, different rules.
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</p>
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<p class="reveal">
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Next in the series: the payment agent itself, which takes the "ready to pay"
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set this agent produces and handles scheduling, release, and reconciliation.
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AP verification decides <em>what</em> to pay. The payment agent decides
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<em>when</em>.
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</p>
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<h2 class="reveal">See it work</h2>
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<p class="reveal">
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The agent is running live with a demo dataset. You can watch it 3-way match real
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invoices, see which issues it classifies as vendor vs internal, read the emails
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and memos it drafts, and click through the approval routing diagrams.
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</p>
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<div class="cta-box reveal">
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<a href="https://invoice-verification.stubborncoder.cloud/" target="_blank" class="cta-link">
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<span class="cta-dot"></span>
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Open the live demo at invoice-verification.stubborncoder.cloud &#8594;
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</a>
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</div>
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<div class="article-footer reveal">
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<div class="article-footer-label">Connect</div>
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<div class="resource-links">
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<a href="https://linkedin.com/in/daviddiaztrapero" target="_blank" class="original-link">LinkedIn &#8594;</a>
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</div>
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</div>
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</article>
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<section class="more-posts">
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<div class="more-posts-title">More writing</div>
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<a href="/blog/ar-collections-agent" class="more-row">
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<span class="more-date">2026.04</span>
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<span class="more-title">Your AR Team Just Got an Agent That Never Sleeps</span>
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<span class="more-src">CFO Living Examples, Part 1</span>
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</a>
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<a href="/blog/multimodal-embeddings" class="more-row">
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<span class="more-date">2026.04</span>
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<span class="more-title">Multimodal Embeddings: One Model, One Vector Space</span>
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<span class="more-src">LinkedIn</span>
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</a>
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<a href="/blog/semantic-caching-hana" class="more-row">
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<span class="more-date">2026.03</span>
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<span class="more-title">Semantic Caching for SAP HANA Cloud</span>
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<span class="more-src">LinkedIn</span>
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</a>
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</section>
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</main>
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</BaseLayout>
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<style>
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.post-hero { position: relative; padding: 10rem 0 4rem; overflow: hidden; }
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</style>

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