Reshape Recap, Tech Premiere: What’s Driving Change at Amazon Business? AI and Beyond

This year’s Amazon Business Reshape 2023 featured a technology-driven keynote to highlight tech trends in procurement and some new innovations from Amazon Business. Mobeen Khan, Director of Global Partnerships & Business Development at Amazon Business took the mainstage to talk about AI in procurement, the importance of technology integrations and the consumerization of the corporate procurement function.

Top Trend: Consumerization of Procurement

While consumers have experienced the intuitive, personalized shopping in our personal lives, business purchasing is still evolving. Buying for business has historically felt cumbersome, confusing and time-consuming. Khan explains, “Why isn’t procurement as seamless, simplified, and satisfying as consumer purchasing? It can be—and fortunately, we’re working hard to make this change happen.”

According to the 2023 State of Procurement report, 95% of buying decision-makers believe procurement has room for optimization. Indeed, survey respondents across all industry sectors unanimously agreed that complex systems and processes is the top internal challenge facing their department today. While riding the post-pandemic wave of innovation, Khan discussed how smarter technology can better anticipate business needs, reduce multi-step processes, and make life easier for buyers within procurement and across other departments.

Top Trend: AI and Beyond

At the same time, the need to democratize our purchasing operations and involve colleagues from beyond the procurement function should work in alignment with an organization's broader ESG goals. At Amazon Business, we're using emerging technologies like AI and machine learning to uncover new ways to accomplish both goals simultaneously.

A year ago, AI solutions were just starting to generate buzz in business circles. Khan highlighted that while AI may be new to the procurement industry, AI is not new to Amazon. Many organizations within Amazon are working hard to identify opportunities to leverage emerging AI solutions and develop meaningful use cases with tangible results.

Pull quote, “AI solutions are evolving at a rapid pace and improving in tandem with our use of them. Our teams at Amazon Business are thinking through these challenges and opportunities as we build AI into our next wave of products and services.” -Khan

Khan explained some of the ways we currently use AI to streamline the procurement process:

• Intuitive spend analysis with Amazon Business Analytics
• Proactive product recommendations with AI-powered search
• Smart chatbots for easy customer service needs
• Streamlined systems integrations

One major area of growth and innovation is creating easy ways to integrate Amazon Business with existing enterprise procurement, expense management, and IdP systems. Amazon Business now integrates with more than 200 systems and hundreds of partners, providing customers with greater agility and flexibility as they choose procurement solutions.

Based on internal 2023 Amazon Business data, Mobeen Khan cited a 50% increase in the number of new customers adopting Punchout, and e-invoicing adoption has increased worldwide by more than 40% this year. A few of the primary methods of integration include Punchout, Punch-In, Integrated Search and Single Sign-on.

New Innovations from Amazon Business

This year, Amazon Business is launching several new features to allow businesses to customize their procurement offering.

• New Integrated Quoting feature allows customers to generate custom quotes for Amazon Business bulk orders. Integrated Quoting provides an automated request for quotes for Amazon Business bulk orders. This is an ideal feature when you’re purchasing more than 999 items or more than $10,000 in total value. You can simply review the Amazon Business bid and place an electronic purchase order. Fairmarkit integrates this Integrated Quoting feature with systems like Coupa and other e-procurement systems to provide more options for our customers.
• New Guided Buying Administrator Toolbar. This new toolbar offers busy administrators the ability to prefer products, including those with sustainability certifications. Administrators can now shop directly on the Amazon Business store and instantly prefer a product while on the product page, creating a new policy for their buyers in an instant. Customers are already finding immense value in this addition to the Amazon Business experience—whether they’re saving more time, tracking compliance with purchasing policies, or helping steer buyers to items approved by their organizations and in alignment with larger ESG goals, faster.
• 3-Way-Match now integrates with the Amazon Business Mobile App, offering a simpler way to close purchase orders. With a simple scan of a package’s barcode, 3-Way Match gives customers the ability to streamline the purchasing process across product receiving, order reconciliation, and invoice payment.
• Amazon Business is rolling out its first App Center. In the Amazon Business App Center, customers can discover third-party apps integrated with Amazon Business that span across solution categories such as: Accounting Management, Rewards and Recognition, Expense Management, Integrated Shopping, Inventory Management and more.
• New enhancements in search, such as the Past Purchase Product Recommendations feature, are making shopping more responsive. The new enhanced autocomplete function offers customers quick suggestions as they begin typing keywords and provides up to three product recommendations based on their previous purchases.
• Amazon Business Analytics also continues to evolve to better serve customers. This year we launched a new Analytics homepage, a new monthly spending summary email, and new data points such as Custom Price, which displays the savings an organization gains through custom offers.