COUPA, KIMBERLY-CLARK & KPMG Putting AI at the front door If Aurora’ s first achievement was standardisation, its second was making sure the new platform did not just move faster: it also got smarter.“ As part of this global implementation, we put AI front and centre,” Suresh says.“ We developed our own generative AI tool in front of our source-to-pay applications.”
The goal, he adds, was to put that intelligence between the system and the user, so people could get to what they needed rather than search for it.
That AI shows up most visibly in a chatbot Kimberly-Clark built in-house and layered on top of Coupa. Before it existed, answering routine questions was a full-time job for a full team of people.“ We had a team whose sole purpose was answering thousands of emails from procurement team members, requisitioners and suppliers asking about the status of their requests or payments,” Dawn says.“ A real person had to spend the time answering those questions.”
Now the assistant fields that volume around the clock.“ Within a matter of seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it can tell a supplier the status of their invoice or help a stakeholder understand when their request is approved,” Dawn says. Jeff puts a number on the scale: more than 300,000 queries a year, answered in 15 languages.
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