How ChargePoint turned one painful process into company-wide adoption

Complex orders inside a global infrastructure business

ChargePoint is the largest EV charging company in the world, operating across North America and Europe. Its teams manage the operational complexity that comes with a global hardware, software, and infrastructure business: partner orders, order execution, shipments, payments, bills, cash receipts, and the financial systems behind them.

The company's partnership with Eaton — one of the world's largest grid-infrastructure providers — created a particularly demanding order-management workflow. Eaton's orders were more complex than the orders ChargePoint received directly from typical customers. Each one had to be interpreted and ingested correctly before ChargePoint could execute the order and ship it.

The work was mission-critical and repetitive. It required experienced employees, but much of their time went to moving and validating information rather than applying their expertise.

Start with one painful process

ChargePoint began with a pilot in order management. Convey digital teammates learned the Eaton process from employees, then automated the ingestion of those complex orders into ChargePoint's systems.

The first deployment succeeded because it addressed a concrete business problem with measurable value. Once the team was comfortable with the process, ChargePoint's employees could operate and extend it themselves — without a permanent implementation team or consultants attached to every new workflow.

The ROI was immediate: the automation saved 33 minutes per invoice. That result made the case for expansion more effectively than an abstract AI strategy could.

From order entry to a governed digital workforce

The rollout expanded beyond Eaton purchase orders into high-volume finance and order-operations work. ChargePoint's teammates now support payment batches, vendor and utility bills, lockbox cash receipts, NetSuite workflows, and data movement between sales and finance systems.

The operating model is intentionally self-sufficient. Internal champions build and manage workflows, while governance controls protect sensitive financial processes. New or changed instructions can require explicit human approval through Slack or email — combining the speed of operator-led automation with the oversight expected in a controlled enterprise environment.

ChargePoint also built the process to withstand external scrutiny. Its financial-workflow approach and supporting audit materials have been reviewed and approved by PwC — an important milestone for putting digital teammates inside accounting operations.

Trust is the prerequisite for mission-critical work

ChargePoint's CEO describes the current level of trust as high. The platform performs the process the company trained it to perform, accurately and without fabricating information.

That reliability is what allows an automation to move from an experiment to part of the operating model. Employees are no longer asking whether the technology can draft a response or summarize a document. They are delegating real transactions and financial workflows to teammates that execute inside the company's existing systems.

The results

ChargePoint's current deployment has delivered capacity equivalent to approximately 20 full-time employees by eliminating manual data movement between NetSuite and sales operations. The accounting team is working toward another 20 FTEs of capacity through its next wave of workflows.

The first 33-minute saving created organic adoption. The broader rollout has turned that initial order-management proof point into a governed set of digital teammates across finance and operations — built and managed by ChargePoint's own employees.

ChargePoint is still early in the opportunity. The company is modernizing major parts of its underlying technology stack, and the next stage will be to embed automation in the processes that emerge from that transformation. But Rick's advice to other leaders is not to wait for a perfect future-state architecture before learning.