At the SSON (Shared Services & Outsourcing Network) conference’s black-tie gala this year, Dexcom was named winner of the 2026 North American Finance Transformation Award, beating out nominees that included Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, and Genpact. The win recognized Dexcom’s AP automation journey, built on Basware and implemented with Extropy Advisors.
Extropy CEO Ravit Gutman was in the room. On the latest episode of ExtropyOnAIR, she and host Mike Jasper broke down what made the win stand out, and what else she saw at SSON that’s worth paying attention to.
Why the Dexcom win matters
The award wasn’t handed out for the biggest cost-cutting story on the floor. As Ravit put it:
“It wasn’t a transformation story that talked about just on metrics and cost savings and all of these different things. It really hit the core of really how it impacted people.”
The result that stood out: Dexcom didn’t outsource its way to efficiency. It automated its AP process and grew invoice volume without adding headcount, and without the overtime that used to come with it.
“They have transformed their organization to be able to grow and get and process much more with the same amount of people that they had in the beginning, not requiring to hire anyone and still not have that overtime.”
Ravit also pointed out that the project was led entirely by two women, Kathy Tanner and Kaitlynn Williams, on the client side, one of the details she was proudest of. Their team’s own headline result: eliminating overtime altogether, and getting time back for their employees’ households as a direct result of the transformation.
For Ravit, the win was also a personal marker:
“Starting as a boutique consulting agency, being next to Genpact, Deloitte nominees… and seeing this transformation story, the journey, and our client win that award was an affirmation for me that everything that we do here, all the work, the people-focused transformation, that that is the work that matters.”
The bigger pattern Ravit is watching: outsourcing vs. transforming
Ravit connected the Dexcom story to something she heard repeatedly across the conference: a disconnect between companies that want to outsource their finance operations and companies that actually want to transform them.
“That disconnect that exists between wanting to outsource and wanting to transform, that is a broken model… many of these companies, large organizations, have just outsourced the problem away and they’ve put their entire purchase-to-pay or order-to-cash practices to a different outsourcing team. The people inside our organization want to implement the change, but you have another side that has no interest essentially in being part of the change.”
That’s the choice Dexcom made differently: transforming the process with the team already in place, rather than routing the problem to an outsourcer.
What SSON 2026 revealed about the AI rush in finance
Beyond the award, Ravit’s biggest takeaway from SSON was how fast, and how uniformly, the conversation has shifted to AI.
“There wasn’t a single booth over there on the floor that didn’t talk about AI… but that’s what sets, once again, that huge gap that exists to the human side of AI, and really understanding how the gap between where all these different solutions are, or where they’re trying to take the market to, and how far the people actually understand and are visualizing or planning to get to that stage.”
Her read: plenty of mature, sophisticated companies at the conference know they need to do something with AI, but very few have a clear answer for where to start.
“It became very daunting to many people to understand: okay, I understand where we need to go, but the distance of how do I… what do I take from here from this conference? How does my Monday morning look like? What do I tell my team?”
That gap, between the technology on offer and an organization’s actual readiness to use it, is exactly the space Extropy positions itself in: leading with purpose and process before technology, not after.
“Let’s start with a purpose. Let’s understand what you’re trying to accomplish. How are you defining success? Let’s work backwards into the process, the people, and the technology.” – Mike Jasper
International Women’s Day at SSON
The conference also devoted a full day to Women’s Day programming, which Ravit said was a highlight for her personally as a woman-owned business founder.
“For a man, when they see a job that they want to apply to, if a man sees that he qualifies 60% of it, he will go for it… but for a woman to apply to that job, she needs to make sure that she covers 100% of the job requirements. And even then, she would still try to convince herself why she’s not fit.”
Her takeaway wasn’t just about hiring, it was about normalizing what a working leader’s life actually looks like:
“I’m trying to figure out what does it mean for me to be a female leader, a women-owned company. How do I support the women in my business in the best possible way?”
The takeaway
Between the Dexcom win and the AI conversations dominating the floor, the through-line Ravit kept coming back to was the same one Extropy leads with in every engagement: technology alone doesn’t transform anything. The organizations getting real results, like Dexcom, are the ones solving for people and process first, and using automation to scale what already works, rather than outsourcing the problem or hoping a new tool closes the gap on its own.
Listen to the full conversation on ExtropyOnAIR.
Book a Discovery Call to talk through what a Basware-powered AP transformation could look like for your organization.
