> Markdown version of [/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1257-hard-problems-hide](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1257-hard-problems-hide). Every page supports `.md` or `Accept: text/markdown`. Links point to the HTML versions so they work for humans too. Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md).

---

# Hard Problems Hide in Boring Places: Turning Accounting Workflows into AI Products


- **Date:** Friday, Jul 10, 2026
- **Time:** 10:20–10:50 (30 min)
- **Room:** Airstream 1
- **Event:** World Congress 2026 Europe

## Recording

[Watch recording](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100226-hard-problems-hide-in-boring-places-turning-accounting-workflows-into-ai-products)

## Description

Accounting and B2B payments are often seen as boring, solved problems — until you try to apply AI to them. The moment a system can misread an invoice, suggest the wrong action, or leak sensitive financial data, “cool AI demos” turn into serious engineering challenges.

In this talk, I’ll share how we at Pliant build AI features in one of the most constrained domains possible, where correctness, trust, auditability, and permissions are non-negotiable. Instead of treating LLMs as smart oracles, we design them as untrusted components that propose actions, operate on structured data, and are constrained by strict policies and approval flows.

We’ll walk through concrete patterns for turning existing accounting workflows into real AI products: grounding models in financial data, using schemas instead of free text, enforcing authorization at the system level, and designing human-in-the-loop interactions that users actually trust. Along the way, I’ll share failure modes we hit in production and how we fixed them.

This talk is about where innovation really happens: not in flashy demos, but in making AI work reliably in the places where mistakes are expensive.

## Speakers

### [Oleksandr Korotkykh](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@oleksandr-korotkykh)

CTO at Pliant
### [Tolga Sümer](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@tolga-sumer)

Senior Software Engineer at Pliant


## Related talks at this congress

- [Unlocking the AI Black Box: Building Trust in the Era of Agentic Production](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1445-unlocking-the-ai) — Jemiah Sius, Harry Kimpel
- [POC Prison: Why agentic systems never escape the lab and how to fix that in 90 days](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1325-poc-prison-why) — Luise Freese
- [Production AI Is a Systems Problem: How ML Breaks at Scale and How to Prevent It](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1010-production-ai-is-a) — Elle S
- [What Production Knows: Closing the Loop Between AI Agents and the Systems They Build](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1470-what-production) — May Walter