COUPA
– a pivot is where the real return on investment lies. Tricia adds:“ I believe there will be workforce savings as a result of procurement automation that we can move. You take the efficiency you gained here and you reinvest that into the more strategic value to the customers. Depending on what their maturity is now and how much savings they’ re getting, it’ s fundamentally up to 6-7X greater savings.”
Practical applications of AI agents The ROI of agentic AI manifests in both tactical efficiency and strategic advisory roles. Tricia categorises these into two distinct types of agents that procurement leaders should be watching. These AI agents work in tandem with human operators to create a more resilient and efficient function.
1. Agents that act These agents handle high-volume, rule-based tasks that typically consume hundreds of man-hours across a large organisation. Examples include payment batch creation agents that identify what payments need to be batched together, following simple rules and eliminating hours of manual work every week. Another powerful example is found in expense management. Historically, expense auditing is a manual process that happens after the money has left the building, leading to a“ find and fix” mentality.
“ With agents, we are able to read every line item on the receipt at the time of entry, now that future-state audit is no longer needed,” Tricia notes.
“ Data is king. Garbage in, garbage out. General data sets... are ineffectively articulating what procurement did and how we should predict what it’ s going to do as a result”
Tricia Miller SVP Product Marketing and Chief Evangelist Coupa
“ We save time there and we make savings there too, because you’ re finding the problems before you pay it out.” This proactive stance is the hallmark of modern procurement.
2. Agents that advise and assist These agents help with complex strategic work, such as category strategy. Traditionally, creating a category strategy is a laborious effort involving weeks of data gathering, stakeholder interviews and market analysis. It leads to a document that is often out of date by the time it is finished. Now,“ category consultant” agents can analyse spend patterns and market data to help create and summarise strategies in real-time.
This empowers the category manager to focus on what humans do best: communicating value, building relationships and managing complex negotiations.
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