Ana, the Autonomous Negotiation Agent from Vertice

Vertice’ s own data shows that one in seven software contracts renews with nobody looking at it, and in tail spend the figure is three in four. As Eldar puts it,“ a great deal of money moves each year without anyone having asked a question about it”.

“ Ana takes the ceiling away,” he says. The agent works out an approach for each vendor, writes every exchange in the customer’ s own voice, and there is no limit to how many negotiations it can run at once. Negotiation, Eldar adds, is a classic example of a role where agents can offer greater capacity, but only if they bring specialist skills and knowledge.

Reception, in his words, has been“ Huge and positive”. Since its launch, more than 4,000 live negotiations have been completed, covering more than half a billion dollars of spend, with average savings of 18 % and around 15 days cut from the negotiation cycle.