Beroe: Unlocking an AI-driven procurement revolution

“I think procurement’s being asked to do a lot.”

Vel Dhinagaravel, CEO and Founder at Beroe, is well aware about the challenges facing the procurement industry today. 

With almost two decades of experience running operations at Beroe, it is fair to say that Dhinagaravel has seen it all since the company’s founding in 2006. 

“There’s a lot of volatility and unpredictability in the market, but I think the key common denominator with the asks of procurement are to prove that there’s a competitive cost structure that they are providing,” he explains. “I think the old notion of measuring procurement performance in the form of savings is changing and evolving into a competitive advantage. This could come through cost, flexibility, innovation, speed, etc. I see best-in-class procurement organisations focusing on measuring their competitive differentiation on all of these different parameters.”

Today, Beroe has become a global powerhouse in procurement and stands as one of the world’s leading procurement intelligence platforms. The organisation empowers procurement leaders to make better, more informed decisions via real-time data and AI-driven insights. For years, Beroe has been actively enabling procurement’s shift from calendar-based optimisation where contracts are looked at shortly before renewal to continuous optimisation, where spend areas are optimised on an ongoing basis. 

“The role of the category manager is to make sure that they understand what’s changing in the market, what are the emerging opportunities and risks while ensuring that they’re addressing each of those in real time,” explains Dhinagaravel. “As that shift is happening, we’ve had to change our operating model from something that was tailored to supporting discreet one-off events, to supporting the category manager throughout the lifecycle.”

With this in mind, Beroe is solving the need for proactive intelligence via its AI agent Abi. Built on a foundation of Beroe’s in-depth, curated market intelligence datasets, consisting of the likes of category developments, supplier alerts and in-depth benchmarks, Abi leverages cutting-edge LLM technology to distill critical insights and deliver them directly in a digestible and actionable format. For more challenging complex contextualisation, Abi can utilise human-in-the-loop capabilities to ensure accurate, nuanced responses tailored to the users needs.

As far as Dhinagaravel is concerned, AI is considered a ‘force multiplier’ that can significantly scale the capacity of sourcing organisations. “If today, the capacity of the sourcing organisation is constrained from a resource perspective, that makes them have to choose where they put their resources, and as a result, they may put some form of spend threshold below which procurement doesn’t play an active role,” discusses Dhinagaravel. “Now with AI, I believe that it’s almost like adding an exoskeleton to the category manager, which should dramatically increase their capacity and decrease those thresholds. This means there’s much greater spend under active management and more continuous management. For me, those are the things that AI should be enabling.”

Find out more about Beroe here.