Future of Procurement with AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the business world, and procurement solutions are no exception. Even companies with a long history of digital adoption are now embracing AI to further optimize workloads. In the near future, an AI-first approach will be crucial for organizations across all operational aspects. Amazon has been developing AI and ML capabilities for more than 20 years, including capabilities that have now expanded to procurement. Today, Amazon Business continues to help customers transform the way organizations manage smart business buying. Here are some of the ways Amazon Business is using AI to improve the business buying experience.
Spend Analysis
Spend analysis is one area where artificial intelligence is revolutionizing procurement. Companies today have access to more data than ever before, and spend analysis is one of the highest-value factors in sourcing and procurement. Traditional data management processes were time-consuming and error-prone, presenting significant challenges for procurement teams. However, AI-powered spend analysis solutions, such as Amazon Business Analytics, can automatically analyze data and unlock timely analysis and data-driven insights for better decision-making.
Amazon Business Analytics and Spend Visibility (a Business Prime exclusive) enable companies to transform data into actionable insights and achieve cost efficiency in pursuit of purchasing goals. As Amazon Business’s AI capabilities continue to evolve, Amazon Business will continue to innovate personalization capabilities. One future use-case in procurement is to use an AI-driven Spend by Category analysis based on your company’s spending patterns to provide strategic assumptions and valuable insights in a user-friendly format.
Proactive Product Recommendations
Another area where AI can help procurement is in improving the search experience and product discoverability for administrators and buyers. Amazon Business’s AI-powered product recommendations can help organizations find the same or comparable items at lower prices or with discount availability, either through the convenience of ‘Subscribe and Save’ or quantity discounts for bulk orders. Using these tools allows users to maximize cost savings without the hassle of performing time-consuming manual data analysis.
Supplier management continues to be a pain point for many organizations. Using AI, Amazon Business can help with supplier management by ensuring buyers comply with buying policies through intelligent classification of suppliers generated by AI. This allows organizations to meet their goals related to buying locally, supporting small and diverse sellers, and even goals related to sustainable purchasing.
System Integrations
Systems integrations can also benefit from AI to improve the user experience. Amazon Business integrates with more than 200 e-procurement, expense management and idP systems. With the Punchout integration, for example, account administrators can customize rules that control parts of orders made by their organization.
"Amazon Business uses AI to provide order safeguard recommendations to administrators. AI and machine learning can help make the shopping experience more dynamic and customized to help buyers and procurement leaders meet their goals."
— Satya Mishra, Director, Amazon Business
AI Chatbots
Amazon Business already enhances the shopping experience with an AI-powered Chatbot. Amazon Business Chatbot can answer your questions, gather information, and direct you in the right direction. The Chatbot takes the pain out of certain procurement processes and streamlines buying for businesses of all sizes. In the near future, Amazon Business customers may not need to explain what problem they are facing when they connect with a Chatbot as Amazon Business AI will be able to proactively analyze customer’s orders, buying patterns and current situation and provide supports instantly.
Large Language Models
Developers are just beginning to understand how generative AI and other large language models (LLMs) can have business applications. In procurement, Amazon Business is experimenting with ways to use this technology to optimize the business buying experience.
"Ensuring buyers purchase what they need while following their organization’s unique buying policies is complex and requires configuration. By investing in large language models, we are able to better understand our customers and improve our AI models to reduce these complexities and to craft optimal data that, besides being compliant, will help organizations modernize and meet their procurement goals."
— Andres Spitzer, Senior Manager, Amazon Business
Looking Forward
Amazon Business continues to find ways to evolve AI-powered features to help organizations make better budgeting decisions, identify untapped opportunities, and enjoy a better business shopping experience. The AI-powered features used at Amazon Business can help enhance the buying experience, helping buyers find what they need quickly and admins to streamline their procurement tasks.
"The functions and features we build into our products are designed to make things easy and take work away from our customers so that they can focus on their core business objectives, which is to grow their business and make their organization better."
— Rajiv Bhatnagar, Director, Amazon Business
If you want to learn more about Amazon’s AI and ML capabilities, please visit here.
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