Spend management company Coupa is the latest organisation to unveil its next generation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools designed to automate elements of the procurement process. Procurement teams are increasingly turning to GenAI as a way to bridge productivity gaps and buy more strategically at a time when global trade is defined by worsening headwinds and growing complexity.
Coupa’s new solutions deploy the increasingly popular “agentic AI”. The technology deploys AI “agents” that can more independently collaborate and make decisions without human oversight. The aim, according to Coupa, is for its AI agents to free up procurement teams’ time for more strategic work, as well as generating faster, better insights.
“Coupa is transforming global trade by using multiagent AI capabilities to dynamically and autonomously match the needs of buyers and suppliers. This collaborative network represents a fundamental shift from static applications to AI-guided networks that can act independently – paving the way for autonomous spend management,” commented Salvatore Lombardo, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Coupa. “Our first step on this journey is expanding our use of our Navi™ AI agent across the entire Coupa platform. Agentic AI will redefine our user experience, unlocking insights and amazing customer outcomes.”
Coupa’s AI agents
Coupa’s AI-native platform is deploying AI agents as part of a reimagined user experience to help streamline execution, accelerate decision-making, and automate routine procurement tasks. By leveraging its unmatched $8T global spend dataset, Coupa plans to enable organisations to scale AI across business processes, providing data-driven insights that far surpass the speed and scale of manual analysis, driving margin expansion while providing agility at enterprise scale.
Coupa announced its first AI agents last year, which provided real-time support and guidance to its users. Coupa says it has since built on that foundation, expanding its agents’ capabilities.
Navi
The new generation of Navi agents includes:
- Coupa Navi™ Analytics Agent empowers Coupa Analytics customers with faster data analysis. The agent can respond to data requests, creating simple charts in Navi and helping users drill down into specific data asks.
- Coupa Navi™ Knowledge Agent has been upgraded to provide immediate responses with information from organisation specific policies to expedite informed decision making.
- Coupa Navi™ Bring Your Own AI Agent, in addition to the Navi “suite” of agents, users can plug-in their own agents and assistants hosted outside of Coupa for agent-to-agent (A2A) collaboration benefits. This framework also enables partners in the Coupa App Marketplace to build and certify agentic experiences.
Also, Coupa says its two new Navi Supply Chain Agents simplify complex decision making with an intuitive, natural language interface that delivers instant, actionable insights. These include:
- Navi™ Modeling Agent –purpose-built to tackle the complexity of supply chain decision making – going beyond simple LLMs, to deliver advanced mathematical reasoning at scale, seamless integration, and responsible AI practices, ultimately driving impactful business results.
- Supply Chain Skill in the Knowledge Base Agent streamlines onboarding of supply chain designers, making it easier for all users to stay updated on building supply chain digital twins, models and scenarios.
The tools have already shown promise in the pilot phase, with an early access user in the oil and gas industry saying: “We are excited about Navi’s potential to revolutionise our daily operations and troubleshooting by pinpointing issues and providing solutions through its extensive knowledge base, while also simplifying complex evaluations with intuitive and rapid scenario analysis guidance.”