The Ardent Partners analyst team recently attended the 2024 Ivalua NOW: Procurement Re-Imaged conference in Miami. This event came on the heels of the company’s slightly larger EMEA conference held in Versailles, France (our own Magnus Bergfors, VP of research, wrote about his attendance at the event). Ivalua is known for selecting unique venues for its user conferences and it didn’t disappoint in 2024.
Today’s dispatch from the conference concludes coverage from the “Innovation Showcase & 2024-2025 Product Roadmap” session, featuring Ivalua’s vice president of product and customer marketing, Vishal Patel, and chief product officer, Pascal Bensoussan. Patel and Bensoussan discussed exciting Ivalua offerings and innovations currently available as well as those that lie on the horizon.
The session focused on three themes: 1) Source-to-Contract, 2) Procure-to-Pay, and 3) Platform & AI. Within each theme were three topic areas:
Source-to-Contract
- Automated Supplier Data Management
- Sourcing Efficiency & Direct Sourcing
- AI-Powered Enterprise Contract Management
Procure-to-Pay
- External Workforce & Catalog Management
- Global Tax Compliance & AP Automation
- Payments & Working Capital Management
Platform & AI
- Intake Management & Orchestration
- Robust Platform & Easier Integration
- Actionable & Pervasive Generative AI
Our dispatch today focuses on the Platform and AI theme and its three related topic areas. What follows is Patel and Bensoussan’s overview and discussion of the offerings and trends within Ivalua’s platform and AI strategic roadmap.
Intake Management Extends Procurement’s Influence
Intake management has been a significant demand from Ivalua customers, says Patel and Bensoussan. Traditionally, users often faced cumbersome forms with numerous questions, requiring extensive configuration to ensure the right questions are asked at the right time. However, with advancements in generative AI and workflow orchestration, Patel and Bensoussan believe the time is right to revolutionize this aspect of procurement.
Generative AI, combined with Ivalua’s robust workflow orchestration and integration framework, offers a seamless way to meet these needs. For example, integrating third-party systems like IT and HR systems that can streamline the onboarding process for new hires through its external workforce management solution. The building blocks are in place, and now Ivalua aims to provide an elegant and automated experience for thousands of users outside the procurement organization.
This new approach, Patel and Bensoussan explain, aligns the COO and the CIO with the CPO on a more strategic level, with payments bringing the CFO into the conversation. It’s an exciting time for intake management, bringing top executives into discussions about procurement in ways that were not occurring before.
Patel and Bensoussan said a critical factor driving this innovation is the need for self-service and guided tools. According to research, 75% of users identify the lack of these tools as the biggest challenge in the buying process, especially for routine and casual spend. Implementing advanced intake management can significantly alleviate this pain point, enhancing the overall procurement experience and efficiency. Intake acts as a layer above all the source-to-pay activities. It’s an effective way to engage with employees on any of their requests efficiently.
The Power of an Integrated Platform
At the core of Ivalua’s platform is a robust integration system. Integration is crucial because procurement does not operate in isolation; it is part of a broader ecosystem of applications and external systems, said Patel and Bensoussan. The platform aims to reduce the time to implement, maintenance cost, and complexity associated with integration by improving documentation and access to documented APIs, providing richer integration logs, and offering market-ready connectors for specific ERPs and other systems. These connectors, available as XML or JSON formats, simplify the integration process, making it faster and more cost-effective.
Additionally, Patel and Bensoussan described the more technical side of the platform —managing SQL queries — which are essential for configurators creating alerts, accessing data, executing workflows, and generating reports. Centralizing the management of these queries enhances security and performance governance, ensuring they are maintained efficiently during upgrades.
Moreover, Patel and Bensoussan acknowledged the amount of intellectual capital in the configurations and messages exchanged within the procurement ecosystem. Initiatives like the company’s AddOn Store for procurement configurations allow partners and customers to share and benefit from best practices, templates, and new standards they’ve created. With over 70 add-ons available, including connectors, generative AI tools, and tax compliance country packages, this growing library enables users to enhance their procurement processes in new and productive ways.
Strength of Generative AI at Platform Level
The final discussion of the day centered around generative AI. Late last year (November 2023) Ivalua unveiled its Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA), powered by GenAI. The technology enables customers to improve efficiency and enables faster, more effective decision-making regarding their suppliers, contracts, and spend.
At the time, Bensoussan remarked that Ivalua was incredibly excited to unveil IVA and its capabilities, particularly the opportunities for procurement professionals. “Procurement teams are inundated with a growing set of responsibilities, but without the additional resources to support. Gen AI has the potential to significantly impact procurement and accelerate various activities within the Source-to-Pay process, freeing up time for more strategic focus,” he said.
“We strongly believe that by putting this technology in the hands of our customers and partners to build their own Gen AI powered use cases, we will co-innovate faster and better,” Bensoussan added.
During their session, Patel and Bensoussan explained how generative AI brings the ability to code, create automation, and deliver reasoning and decisioning. In essence, it’s a new operating system, a new computing paradigm that can be controlled by natural language. The use-case examples showcased IVA’s functionality and capabilities.
The technology’s contracting capabilities are impressive. When provided with a contract, IVA can understand and summarize the contract and create a list of questions to better understand the content of the contract. Who are the contract parties? What are the consequences of a contract breach? While this information is spread throughout the contract, IVA compiles that information and delivers an articulated answer.
When working with suppliers, IVA can streamline supplier performance evaluations. For example, a supplier evaluation that asks 11 questions can be summarized by IVA with the strengths, weaknesses and challenge areas of the supplier. Going a step further, the user can ask IVA for a supplier improvement plan — which IVA does with objectives and relative timeframes as well as specific tactics to achieve the objectives and KPIs to track progress.
Out of the box, IVA delivers on the following functionalities:
- Supplier Research: Find and gather relevant information on existing or new suppliers and their offerings and enrich their profiles.
- Category & Market Insights: Within seconds, conduct specific research and summarize key trends within your category.
- Legal Assistant: Create an instant contract summary or draft a clause to ensure coverage of specific elements.
- RFP Assistant: Leverage best practices to articulate and share the objective, timeline, success criteria and selection process of your next sourcing event with all invited suppliers.
- Enhanced Communications: Get instant help creating / proofreading supplier communications and sourcing invitations.
- Generate Improvement Plans: Review supplier performance responses, summarize, and suggest appropriate actions within a structured improvement plan
- Chat With Your Documents: Extract information, data, and insights from documents in seconds (Supplier ESG reports, certifications, contracts, 10K filings, invoices).
Ivalua stated that it has developed its own AI orchestration services, enabling it to offer best-in-class large language models (LLMs) both from third parties such as OpenAI running on Microsoft Azure and open-source models fine-tuned by Ivalua and running on the Ivalua Cloud infrastructure.
We look forward to next year’s Ivalua NOW user conference and ongoing updates and discussions around its emerging technology and platforms.
