AI Is Coming for Accounts Receivable’s Busywork, Not Its Jobs

Tarek Alaruri has spent his career on both sides of freight’s money problem. First, chasing down loads as a broker, now helping shippers and carriers get paid faster. The CEO and cofounder of Stuut joined Malcolm Harris and Michael Vincent on FreightWaves’ “What the Truck?!?”

podcast to talk about how his company is using AI to connect the entire order-to-cash process into a single workflow that, by his own account, has never existed in one place before. Alaruri’s path into the AR space started at TQL, where he got his first look at freight brokerage from the inside.

“I did rather well there, but I really wanted the opportunity to try to fix something,” Alaruri said. That itch to fix something eventually became Stuut, his second company after an earlier venture called Fairmarkit that focused on freight quotations and bids. But it was what he saw happening on the collections side that stuck with him.

Alaruri estimated that a huge share of a brokerage’s back-office time gets swallowed by one issue. “I think forty percent of our team’s time was spent chasing down invoices,” Alaruri said, “We had a single model: Did the customer pay us? Was there an issue? Did something in the docket get messed up? Was there a late fee?”

That inefficiency was strikingly analog for an industry that talks constantly about digitization. After spending enough time faxing paperwork to a shipper late at night, Alaruri knew there had to be a way to modernize some of those processes.

He credits his time at TQL, working alongside CEO Kevin Kaley and the broader leadership team, with pushing him toward technology in the first place. By 2024, Alaruri said, he was looking for what was next, and found that the receivables problem he’d identified years earlier still hadn’t been solved.

“Put yourself in the shoes of a broker or a carrier,” Alaruri said. “There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of paperwork, a lot of things that go on, and, you know, it’s not automated at all.” He described a workflow that’s still stitched together with manual steps even in supposedly digital systems.

“There were a lot of items you still had to upload into a portal, and then you would have to take a copy, fax it over, and then mark it completed,” he said. That gap, according to Alaruri, is why the space is ripe for disruption. “No one’s really innovated on this process, even up to now,” Alaruri said.

“Every company in the world needs to collect their money, and it’s a huge opportunity where our customers see a forty percent reduction in overdue invoices.” While collections is the most visible symptom, Stuut built something broader than a bill-chasing tool.

The platform is built to manage the full order-to-cash lifecycle, from assessing customer credit risk on the front end, through proactive customer communication, to resolving disputes and finally applying cash once it lands. Collections, in Alaruri’s view, is just the most painful piece of the process.

Now that AI hype is settling down, transportation and logistics companies are wondering whether or not AI can deliver on freeing up locked capital and removing the friction around verifying completed contracts.

The difference with AI today and previous technology fads, according to Alaruri, is that it can finally connect processes that used to live in separate silos. “There are vertical specific solutions and there are point solutions, but they’re not encompassing a workflow,” Alaruri said.

“At Stuut, we know that the way to really unlock this capital is to take these siloed datasets and close that loop. Did you get paid the right amount, and if not, how do you triage that and handle a dispute, and then how do you collect from a customer?” Stuut works across multiple channels to unify those data points.

The platform is built to manage the actual conversations companies have with their customers. “The question was, how do we do that across the audio, SMS, and email or digital formats? That’s really what we focus on,” Alaruri said.

In effect, Stuut functions as a customer interaction layer, handling the outreach, reminders, and dispute resolution that used to require a person on the phone or drafting an email, all while keeping customer relationships intact with a personal touch. The goal, according to Alaruri, isn’t to hand more tedious work to already-stretched finance teams.

“Someone working in accounts receivable or at a brokerage doesn’t want to be doing this full time,” Alaruri said. “They just want to get paid and provide for their family. Even the people in finance want to start looking at their customers as a portfolio, not necessarily items to chase off a spreadsheet.”

Given the current anxiety around AI displacing jobs in logistics, Alaruri clarified that Stuut’s technology is not coming for accounts receivable roles. “There are two edges of the coin, especially in this industry,” Alaruri said. “There’s the 3PL model where your broker is essentially doing this job. All we’re offering is to take off twe