Case Study

How Microsoft recovers overdue invoices with AI — without a single customer complaint

Neil Doyle, Group Finance Manager at Microsoft GCFS, on deploying AI-powered collections across hundreds of enterprise accounts.

Neil Doyle
Neil Doyle
Group Finance Manager, Microsoft GCFS
20+ years in finance transformation • Treasury Today Award Winner
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Zero
Customer Complaints
Across thousands of automated touchpoints
3.2x
Recovery Improvement
Compounding gains, batch over batch
+130%
Contact Enrichment
AI discovers decision-makers your data misses
44
US States Reached
Behavioral intelligence across America

From cleaning airplanes to leading AI-first collections at one of the world's largest companies.

Neil Doyle isn't your typical finance executive. Before building a career spanning two decades in global finance, he started as a kitchen porter, cleaned airplanes between college classes, and worked the floor in retail. That hands-on start shaped his approach: teamwork first, never shy from hard work, always find a better way.

Today, he leads collections strategy at Microsoft's Global Treasury and Financial Services — managing one of the world's most complex receivable portfolios across hundreds of thousands of customers. His team of 25+ covers EMEA operations, and his track record includes migrating 13,000 customers from indirect models to credit scoring in just eighteen months.

Neil has been recognized with multiple Treasury Today awards for crisis management and tech innovation. He describes himself simply: "Chief problem solver."

20+ years in global finance Team of 25+ across EMEA $100B+ annual sales managed Treasury Today Award winner Panelist, Zurich AI Forum 2026
Neil Doyle
Read Neil's full story
From kitchen porter to Microsoft finance leader
"I'm lucky — Microsoft is positioned as an AI adopter. But at the individual level, there's apprehension. People are nervous. So you have to demonstrate that this technology works, and that the customer experience is actually better."
— Neil Doyle

The problem every enterprise faces

Cash flow has become the single most important metric in enterprise finance. Not revenue — cash. As capital expenditure rises, supply chains get more expensive, and margins tighten, getting paid on time is no longer a nice-to-have. It's existential.

But traditional collections hasn't kept up. Agencies are slow, opaque, and risky. Internal teams can't scale without adding headcount. And the biggest fear of all: aggressive collection destroys the customer relationships you spent years building.

Microsoft needed a different approach. One that could scale across hundreds of accounts, recover more than traditional methods, and do it without a single customer complaint.

"Most of the time, collections is not a pleasant experience. The question is: how can you make it both a better experience where the customer still feels listened to — while still getting the outcome?"
— Neil Doyle

The shift that changed everything

Neil saw the inflection point when generative AI moved from theory to execution. Not just automation — intelligence. The ability to pull information from dozens of sources, analyze behavior patterns, and make decisions in real-time that no human team could match at scale.

For Microsoft, the question wasn't whether to adopt AI in finance. It was how fast.

Before
  • Monthly reports from agencies
  • Generic outreach to AP departments
  • Manual dispute resolution
  • Weeks to see first results
  • No behavioral intelligence
After (with Respaid)
  • Real-time notifications on every event
  • AI-personalized multi-channel outreach
  • Automated dispute resolution
  • Results in days, not months
  • Behavioral intelligence across 44 states
"When generative AI could pull so much information together from so many different data sources and present an output that was far superior and far quicker than any human could do — that's when I realized this is a seismic shift."
— Neil Doyle

The engine behind the results

Multi-Channel AI Outreach

Thousands of personalized emails, AI phone calls, and portal interactions — each timed and tailored by our behavioral intelligence engine. Not batch-and-blast. Every touchpoint is optimized for that specific person, in that specific region, at that specific moment.

58% email open rate (3x industry avg)

AI Contact Discovery

For every batch of accounts, our AI analyzes the existing contact data, identifies unresponsive or incorrect contacts, and discovers new decision-makers — expanding reach by over 130%. You submit accounts with the contacts you have. We find the ones you don't.

+130% additional decision-makers

Real-Time Intelligence Portal

Every email open, every phone call, every dispute, every payment — visible in real-time. Not a monthly PDF. A live dashboard with telemetric data that most enterprises don't have access to in their own systems.

Real-time visibility across every touchpoint
"Your portal and the information that comes in — that is fantastic. When something happens on a customer account, you get a personalized notification. The telemetric data you provide... we don't have access to that within our own system."
— Neil Doyle

Every batch adds a new capability.
Improvement is compounding.

1x
Batch 1: Baseline
Multi-channel email outreach + portal
1.3x
Batch 2: + AI Calls
Voice AI reaches decision-makers directly
3.2x
Batch 3: + Enrichment
AI discovers contacts + resolves disputes
5x+
Next: + Invoices
Direct invoice access eliminates #1 dispute

The model learns from every interaction. Each batch is smarter than the last.

When debtors push back, AI resolves it

Disputes are inevitable in enterprise collections. What matters is how fast — and how intelligently — they're resolved.

86%
of all disputes resolved

Nearly 40% resolved automatically by AI — no human intervention

Without invoice access With invoice access
Resolution rate 86% 95%+ (projected)
Auto-resolved by AI ~40% 80%+ (projected)
Avg. resolution time 48 hours Under 1 hour
#1 bottleneck Invoice requests stall indefinitely Resolved instantly
"A lot of the disputes are just customers looking for a copy of the invoice. They didn't have it on record. When you provide that documentation, they pay. When you can't, accounts stall."
— Neil Doyle

The metric that matters most

ZERO
customer complaints

Across thousands of automated touchpoints — emails, phone calls, portal interactions — not a single Microsoft customer complained about the tone, the approach, or the experience.

Respectful tone, validated by Microsoft

"I like the tone of communications. There's a respectful tone... not one of them complained about the tone or the engagement. That's a testament to you guys."

Enterprise-grade security

Authentication restricted to microsoft.com domain. Call recordings shared via secure, authorized access only. SOC 2 Type II certified.

Real-time transparency

Every action is visible in real-time. No black box. No monthly reports. Full control over what's happening with your customers at all times.

"Just do it. Experiment. Learn from it. Iterate. It's the technology of the future — they should get on board now."
— Neil Doyle, Group Finance Manager, Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is the world's largest software company, powering businesses of every size across every industry. Microsoft's Global Treasury and Financial Services (GCFS) manages one of the most complex financial operations on the planet — spanning hundreds of thousands of customers, billions in annual sales, and collections across dozens of countries.
$245B+
Annual Revenue
228K+
Employees
190+
Countries

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