No AI Degree Required: How One Finance Team Put AI Into Production on Its Own Terms

Finance teams aren’t short on AI pitches, and the pitch usually comes with homework: learn the technology, reshape your process around it, and wait six to nine months to see whether it works. For AP and AR teams already stretched thin, that’s a hard sell. It’s a risky one too when the output is an invoice, a payment or a number an auditor will question.

Murex, LLC, a Texas-based liquid fuels marketer, spent two and a half years hearing that pitch before it chose a different approach. Every load Murex moves by truck, barge and rail produces a bill of lading that has to be reconciled before an invoice can go out. That’s 10,000 to 15,000 a month, in formats that vary by terminal and carrier. Murex didn’t hire AI specialists to fix it. Its finance team explained how the work actually gets done, and Seekr, a provider of explainable AI, made the technology fit that process. Neither side had to become an expert in the other’s field. 

In this session, CFO Mauricio Ramirez and Peter Spurgeon, CPA and Murex’s AI program manager, join Lloyd Cope, Seekr CRO, to share what that looked like in practice. They’ll cover the questions they put to every vendor, what a CPA needs to see before trusting an AI-generated invoice, and how the benefits reached both sides of the invoice: suppliers paid faster and customers billed more accurately.

Attendees will learn to:

• Use a buyer’s checklist to tell production-ready AI partners from perpetual pilots
• Identify what an auditable AI decision record should contain
• Put a dollar value on a day removed from the cash conversion cycle
• Scope an AI project around existing finance processes rather than new technical skills

Mark Brousseau
President, Brousseau & Associates 

Over the past 30 years, Mark Brousseau has established himself as a thought leader on accounts payable, accounts receivable, payments and document automation.   A popular speaker at industry conferences and on webinars and podcasts, Brousseau advises prominent end-users and solutions and services providers on how to use automation to improve document- and payments-driven business processes.  Brousseau has chaired numerous educational conferences and has served on several industry committees and boards.  He resides in Center City Philadelphia with his wife and three sons.

From 2014 to 2022, Mauricio was Director of Commodity Sales and Trading at Macquarie Group in Houston. He was responsible for structuring and implementation physical and financial client hedging strategies, managing a global book of more than 50 traders across a wide range of commodities. He spent six years at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Commodities, Inc., as Vice President, Commodity Sales and Marketing.

Mauricio earned a Bachelors of Electrical Engineering from the University of Houston and a Masters of Business Administration in Finance from Houston Baptist University. In 2024, he completed the Chief Financial Officer Program at Columbia Business School. He is a Certified Treasury Professional.

Peter Spurgeon
Senior Accountant, Murex

Pete has been at Murex since 2022, supporting the financial operations behind one of the most extensive fuel distribution systems in the United States. Peter began his career in 2017 as an Accounting Associate and progressed through Senior Accounting Associate and Financial Accounting Supervisor roles before stepping into his current position. Along the way, he gained experience with TT Electronics, L3Harris Technologies, and L3 Technologies, building a foundation in financial accounting across the aerospace, defense, and electronics sectors. That cross-industry background gives him a practical view of financial reporting and controls in complex, operations-heavy businesses. Peter holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting and Finance from East Texas A&M University.

Lloyd Cope
Chief Revenue Officer, Seekr

Lloyd brings over two decades of technology sales leadership expertise. He has deep experience in AI and forward deployment, shaping strategic vision, driving global sales and marketing initiatives, and leading go-to-market execution and high-impact revenue growth. Before joining Seekr, Lloyd held leadership roles at Altana AI, and Palantir Technologies.