VERTICE
He sees this as the clearest evidence yet of procurement teams’ growing comfort in giving AI more prominent roles, and says the timing for Ana was just right. There is real variety in how Ana is used. The majority of customers deploy Ana on tail spend software renewals – whether totally autonomously, or with humans reviewing each exchange, or teams using her as a co-pilot on human-led strategic contracts, where she offers custom insights and models the likely outcome of each potential negotiation tactic. But in all cases, one trend remains universal: use is expanding.
Closing the loop with procure-to-pay Vertice has now taken the platform into P2P, and Eldar says the move was driven by customer demand. Customers asked for it repeatedly, and with growing urgency.
The logic was straightforward. Vertice already held the background on the spend decision, the contract negotiation, the price and the final terms, yet the invoice would arrive in a different system weeks later with none of this context. Finance teams had to reconcile invoices to purchase order( POs) and plan payments in isolation, without the full background of the transaction. Customers had come to value Vertice’ s ease of use and results across I2P and wanted to complete the whole process inside the same platform. Many, Eldar says, were also keen to move off legacy systems: teams running a modern process at the front end with a dated finance tool at the back, clunky integrations, confused flows and ultimately, no option but to reconcile manually. However they phrased it, the request boiled down to“ a single record from the request all the way through to the payment”.
Built with customers Vertice developed the product through a design partner programme spanning a wide range of finance setups. Some teams had mature purchase order discipline; others had hardly any. They ran on different ERPs, and some were procurementled while others were finance-led. Partners were brought in early and asked for“ brutal honesty” about the plans and prototypes, in exchange for early access and real influence over what was built.
Discussions about usability and how the platform operates day to day outnumbered discussions about features by roughly three to one. Eldar says this is testament to how well Vertice knows its audience, but also that this is usually how it goes when you actually listen to customers, and it has produced a product that finance and procurement teams enjoy using. Their input helped Vertice keep the user experience as lightweight as possible without compromising functionality. They also clarified where AI is most useful, whether driving automations or delivering insights, or anything in between.
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