(This is Part 2 of our series on the 2026 Ivalua NOW conference in Paris. You can read Part 1: Procurement Enters the Agentic AI Era [here].)
As we discussed in Part 1, the Carrousel du Louvre served as the launchpad for a major shift in Ivalua’s product philosophy: The move from simple Generative AI assistance to a fully agentic platform. At the center of this transformation is IVA Studio, the new “factory” for autonomous procurement operations announced during Founder and Chief AI Officer David Khuat-Duy‘s mainstage keynote at Ivalua NOW 2026.
While the concept of an AI “copilot” has become common, IVA Studio represents something far more structural. It is a no-code development environment that allows procurement teams to use, build, orchestrate, and govern custom AI agents (known as “skills”) grounded in their own reliable Source-to-Pay (S2P) data.
The Six Categories of Agentic Skills
To help organizations move quickly from vision to value, Ivalua is releasing a comprehensive library of ready-to-deploy skills across the entire S2P spectrum. These agents are designed to handle the heavy lifting of procurement cycles, categorized into six primary categories:
1. Supplier Management
- Improvement Plan: Manage and track supplier development initiatives.
- Mass Communication: Automate outreach and notifications to the supplier base.
- Profile Enrichment: Automatically append and update supplier records with external data.
- Questionnaire Generator: Use AI to draft tailored supplier assessments.
- Document Validation: Automatically verify the accuracy and validity of supplier-provided files.
- Supplier Onboarding: Streamline and automate the end-to-end registration process.
2. Sourcing
- Price Benchmark: Compare supplier quotes against market data and historical pricing.
- RFP Process Proofread: Review sourcing events for compliance and clarity before launch.
- Sourcing Supplier Finder: Identify and match potential suppliers to new projects based on historical performance.
- RFx Analysis: Analyze and summarize complex supplier bids.
- Quote-to-RFx: Automatically convert supplier quotes into formal sourcing events.
- Autonomous Sourcing: Agents that can manage entire sourcing cycles within defined guardrails.
3. Contract Management
- Contract Creation: Generate new agreements using approved templates and data.
- Negotiated Terms: Identify and track variations in standard legal language.
- Contract Summary: Provide rapid overviews of long-form legal documents.
- Clause Drafting: Use AI to suggest or refine specific legal clauses.
- Contract Knowledge: Search and query the entire contract repository for specific obligations or terms.
4. eProcurement
- Catalog Enrichment: Automatically improve and update product descriptions and data.
- Product Information: Search and summarize detailed item specifications.
- Non-Catalog Requisition Help: Guide users through complex, off-catalog purchasing requests.
- Quote-to-Order: Convert supplier quotes directly into purchase orders.
- EWM Legal Review: Embedded legal review for external workforce management.
- EWM Resume Eval & Interview Prep: Screen external talent and prepare hiring managers for interviews.
5. Invoicing & Payments
- Invoicing Compliance: Verify invoices against local regulations and internal tax rules.
- Invoice Knowledge: Search and analyze the historical invoice database.
- Expense Policy Compliance: Automatically flag non-compliant employee spending.
- Expense Capture: Streamline the intake of expense receipts and data.
- AP Automation: Agents capable of handling full coding workflows end-to-end.
6. Platform & Cross-Solution
- Intake Management: Guide stakeholders through the initial “front door” of the buying process.
- Conversational Analytics: Use natural language to query and visualize spend data.
- User Support: Provide embedded, 24/7 technical and process assistance to users.
- Category Research Assistant: Assist category managers with market intelligence and strategy.
- Message Translation: Enable seamless communication across global teams in multiple languages.
- Operational Data Explorer: Drill down into granular performance and workflow data.
The Skill Ecosystem: Add-ons, Marketplaces, and DIY
One of the most powerful aspects of IVA Studio is that it’s not a closed system. Ivalua is facilitating a three-tiered approach to expansion:
- Add-On Store: Pre-built innovations from Ivalua’s certified partner ecosystem.
- Public Marketplace: Integration with external intelligence providers.
- Build Your Own: The ability for “Citizen Developers” within procurement to codify their unique processes into an agent skill without writing code.
Ardent Analysis: A Major Win for Ivalua and Its Customers
This development is both practical and strategically important. The concept of the new IVA Studio for agentic skills (or agents) echoes the early evolution of eSourcing, when solution providers introduced structured templates for different negotiation formats (i.e., multi-stage events, sealed bids, auctions, etc.) to help standardize and scale procurement execution. What Ivalua is doing now is conceptually similar, but far more ambitious. Instead of templates for events, it is building configurable, AI-driven “skills” that align to the core activities performed by procurement professionals.
This matters because most CPOs today are approaching AI with a high degree of caution and intentionality. The challenge is not just identifying use cases, but determining where to start, how to pilot, and how to scale responsibly. IVA Studio begins to address that challenge directly. By offering a library of ready-to-deploy skills, Ivalua provides a structured entry point that reduces friction around experimentation and accelerates time-to-value. Even if these agents require tuning at the customer level, and many will, this becomes a far more manageable exercise for procurement teams in the near term.
More broadly, the market is still in a formative stage when it comes to AI in procurement. There are few established best practices, and many organizations are facing a “blank page” problem. By productizing common procurement activities into reusable, intelligent components, Ivalua is helping to define a starting point for the industry. If these skills can be scaled and adopted broadly across its customer base, this represents a meaningful step forward, not just for Ivalua, but for how its procurement customers operationalize AI.
The Human-in-the-Loop Governance
Crucially, this autonomy does not mean a lack of control. IVA Studio includes a “System of Governance” designed to monitor agent reasoning and performance. As we see the rise of new roles like the Agent Portfolio Manager and Business Ontologist, the goal is clear: Use AI to replace the mundane tasks that keep buyers from being strategic, not to replace the buyers themselves.
Next in the Series: We look at the real-world proof points from Ivalua NOW 2026, including how leaders at companies like Hutchinson and Körber are turning these technical possibilities into operational value.
