Dost launches AskDost AI assistant for finance teams

Dost has launched AskDost, an AI assistant for finance and operations teams. It is available as a standalone product or within the company's finance automation platform.

AskDost connects to a company's ERP and other financial data sources, allowing users to ask questions in natural language and prepare finance workflows for human approval. It can be used across invoices, approvals, payments and reconciliation, and lets teams update general ledger coding rules in plain language.

Unlike general-purpose AI assistants, AskDost is designed to work directly on live company financial data and keep a record of any action taken. Nothing is executed until a person signs it off, with an audit trail showing what changed and who approved it.

The launch expands Dost's offering beyond process automation into business intelligence and workflow orchestration for finance teams. It is also the company's first product that can be adopted without the wider Dost platform, as it connects directly to an organisation's ERP.

Finance focus

Dost said AskDost is built to understand invoices, purchase orders, VAT codes and general ledger coding without additional set-up. According to the company, a user can start with a single line in a profit and loss account and trace it back to the underlying invoice lines within one conversation.

The system is also designed to be tailored by individual teams. Through a tool called Dost Studio, finance teams can build and deploy their own apps and agents on their own data, rather than changing internal processes to fit new software. Queries can be saved, shared across teams and refreshed on a schedule so users work from an updated view.

Dost positioned the launch against slow adoption of specialist AI tools in finance departments. It cited Deloitte's latest UK CFO survey, which found that 67% of CFOs believe their organisations are only about a quarter of the way towards the transformation they expect AI to deliver.

The company also referred to CFO Connect's Europe-wide 2026 survey, which found that two-thirds of finance teams use at least one AI tool, yet no specialist finance AI product named in the survey accounted for more than 1% usage. Dost argued that many teams are instead entering company data into general-purpose assistants, which do not provide an audit trail or direct visibility into ERP data.

Existing platform

Dost's existing platform automates accounts payable and accounts receivable as a single process, covering invoice capture, data extraction, matching, approvals, payments and bank reconciliation. It integrates with ERP systems including SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Sage and Oracle.

Dost said it has processed more than 5 million accounting transactions and achieved 95% data extraction accuracy. Customers named by the company include HomeServe, Honest Greens, Housfy and Primaprix.

AskDost adds a conversational layer on top of that transaction data for finance leaders, procurement teams, and accounts payable and accounts receivable functions. It is intended to give those teams a single view across operational and financial data, including planning and forecasting.

"I've sat across from hundreds of finance leaders. Every one of them has the data they need somewhere, but reaching the explanation takes days and three different people. Ask something simple, like whether we're paying above contract or where cash will be in eight weeks, and the answer is spread across three systems and someone's spreadsheet. We built AskDost to overcome this. We know every team runs finance differently, so we wanted teams to be able to shape it themselves, with their own agents and apps on their own data. Nobody should have to rebuild their finance function around a piece of software," Adam Barbera, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Dost, said.