A New AI Series on CPO Rising
The power of artificial intelligence (AI) is undeniable. Its impact and influence are revolutionizing the Procurement automation market. According to research from Ardent Partners, AI will soon be ubiquitous in this sector, offering unparalleled efficiencies and capabilities. The transformative possibilities of AI will drive innovations in source to pay, eSourcing, risk management, and overall supply chain management, streamlining enterprise operations and improving business decision-making.
In view of these advancements, Ardent Partners is excited to announce a special “AI in Action” interview series. We invite your company to participate in this series and contribute to the thought leadership around AI by having a product or strategy executive respond to high-level questions from Andrew Bartolini, our Founder and Chief Research Officer for Ardent Partners.
Today’s AI in Action profile features a conversation with Vishal Patel, SVP, Product and Customer Marketing for Ivalua.
AB: Good day Vishal, tell our readers a little bit about yourself.
VP: My name is Vishal Patel, and I am the SVP of Product and Customer Marketing at Ivalua. I’ve spent the past 20 years in various roles within the Procurement and Supply Chain technology market. As an industry analyst, I researched and advised organizations in various industries on best and innovative practices, digitization and optimization. I also bring a thorough understanding of market trends and digital technologies that can help enterprises be more effective with their Procurement and Supply Chain strategies. At Ivalua, I help companies grow, scale, and become category leaders, bringing a keen eye for the right product and market fit.
AB: Thank you. I think I know your answer but let me ask anyway … what are the biggest opportunities for AI to improve procurement efficiencies and productivity?
VP: In today’s swiftly changing technological landscape, autonomous agents powered by Generative AI (GenAI) are not just a trend; they represent a transformative shift in how organizations approach efficiency and automation. At Ivalua, we recognize the immense potential of these technologies to revolutionize procurement processes, enabling unparalleled levels of productivity and strategic insight. The emergence of autonomous agents powered by GenAI in procurement is shaped by several key trends, each supported by real-world data and insights:
- Data Processing and Scenario Analysis: Generative AI is being used to crunch large data sets and process scenario-based results, reducing the need for complex manual interventions. This helps in increasing efficiencies and generating actionable insights based on historical trends, demand profiles, and supplier performance.
- Rapid Improvement and Adoption: The reasoning capabilities of generative AI models are improving rapidly, and the speed of these improvements is unprecedented. This rapid advancement is driving quicker adoption and integration into procurement processes.
- Automation and Efficiency: A significant portion of procurement tasks can be automated using generative AI. This includes automating RFI/RFP/RFQ generation, spend analytics, and contract lifecycle management. It’s estimated that 50% to 80% of current procurement work can be automated or shifted to self-service models.
- Enhanced Decision-making: Generative AI aids in handling broad, layered questions and drawing implications that lead to well-informed decisions. It integrates reasoning capabilities, which are crucial for making complex procurement decisions.
- Integration with Existing Systems: Generative AI is being integrated with digital procurement backbones, such as source-to-pay platforms, to connect internal data (e.g., spend categories, suppliers, etc.) with external data (e.g., category risk, supplier risk, etc.) and enhance functionalities like supplier discovery, contract management, and spend analysis. This integration helps in forming a comprehensive view of procurement operations.
- Multi-Agent Frameworks: Companies are developing multi-agent frameworks that allow various AI agents to work collaboratively, improving procurement and supply chain operations. These frameworks are expected to bring significant advancements in 2025.
- Conversational and User-Friendly Interfaces: The simplicity of conversational user interfaces for generative AI tools has driven their adoption, making it easier for procurement professionals to leverage these technologies without extensive training.
AB: How are you ensuring the accuracy and reliability of customers’ AI models (AI data output)?
VP: Generative AI is based on probabilistic technology. It’s like asking “how can a user be sure that a forecast is accurate?”. Generative AI is a tool. The quality of the answer depends on the quality of the question (input). A vague prompt will lead to a vague or inaccurate response.
Like any predictive or probabilistic technology, the quality of the answer can be measured and improved. Here are a few ways to improve the quality of the response:
- Users can provide a precise and clear prompt with one or two examples (Few Shot Learning, FSL), often fine-tuned via iteration and testing.
- Configurators can set a low temperature to help prevent the LLM from being too creative and avoid unpredictable responses via model seeding.
- The configurator can also provide contextually relevant information to help focus the LLM, ground the response, and reduce the noise in the input (using RAG techniques and internet search results).
- With AI orchestration becoming increasingly important, we are also incorporating things such as a Quality Agent, whose purpose is to verify and validate the quality of the processing steps (which may involve other agents) via self-check, error detection, and self-consistency techniques.
When using Generative AI tools, like IVA, it is imperative that a human be “in the loop” and verifying the accuracy of the information.
AB: How can you support procurement clients when an AI skills gap deficiency exists?
VP: Ivalua has historically approached every customer as unique in their requirements, environments, processes and talent. We focus our efforts on adoption, which translates to Ivalua Academy courses, product enhancements — such as Ivalua Guides and Add-on Store — and increased user events which include multiple AI bootcamps around the world.
Our Academy courses kicked off right away with half our customers utilizing educational components from the get-go. Since then, we’ve hosted four GenAI bootcamps for customers and three for partners to maximize support. Our configurability extends into AI use cases through our Add-on store, so these bootcamps not only afforded our customers and partners the ability to maximize IVA to enhance procurement processes but create their own use cases as well. These events were widely attended, with our professional services and strategic advisory teams walking each person through configuration, which didn’t just close the gap but enabled individuals to streamline change management at their organizations. We plan to continue these throughout 2025 and are excited to see the results.
AB: How do you view your customers’ (and prospective customers’) AI attitudes?
VP: We are approaching S2P with the intent of radically simplifying the experience for all users. That includes the unified platform elements. We have always been committed to offering a single source of truth for supplier data to improve data access and quality, seamless process flows to maximize automation and compliance, and full product and supplier lifecycle collaboration. But it goes far beyond that with us aiming to eliminate the need for users to click through screens, and instead, simply type their need in a conversational manner and have the system initiate the action (i.e., a press release) or provide the information needed (i.e., order status at basic level or a full category intelligence report with strategic recommendations at a more complex level). This combines the advantages of our unified platform on one code base and data model with intake and GenAI, which our long-term strategy has positioned us uniquely well for.
Ivalua customers recently completed a survey to assess the value of GenAI, how usage and adoption is going, as well as what they plan to do next. Roughly 50% of respondents believe GenAI is highly valuable and transformative, making the potential for impact extremely high in their continued journeys. A little less than 50% are already experimenting with it, participating in Academy learning courses, bootcamps, and creating Add-ons with partners. Even more interesting, these same customers are developing internal policies to solidify AI’s place in the organization. To us, this means much more than an attitude shift but also an acknowledgement of its permanence.
AB: Where do you see AI solution offerings within procurement in five years?
VP: 2025 will see the dawn of AI agents in procurement.
In 2025, AI agents powered by Generative AI, a.k.a. Agentic AI, will become a reality, accelerating procurement from a transactional department into a strategic force for the business. These sophisticated systems will be embedded into comprehensive spend management platforms, designed to perform complex tasks with minimal human intervention. Agentic AI will leverage next-generation Large Language Models (LLMs) to access and analyze data, evaluate options, make informed decisions, and take action. Operating within a multi-layered framework, agents will integrate enterprise and/or other data sources, orchestrate workflows, interact with users, and much more.
To date, Generative AI features have operated on a “one-and-done” basis — delivering outputs that serve primarily as drafts or prototypes. However, advances in LLMs now enable multi-agent AI ecosystems that perform complex reasoning, validate outputs, and provide actionable insights.
This shift to adaptive, real-time conversational AI capabilities elevates procurement’s potential. For example, rather than relying on isolated AI features, smart source-to-pay platforms will leverage AI agents to manage tasks like spend analysis, RFP generation, and contract negotiation autonomously. This will allow procurement professionals to focus on high-value decisions, driving productivity and strategic value. To leverage AI securely and reliably, organizations must ensure Agentic AI solutions rely on privacy-first multi-instance architecture to isolate sensitive data, utilize no-code tools to increase flexibility, and rely on a unified data model to ensure outputs are accurate.
AB: I appreciate your time today!
VP: Thank you.
