COUPA
“ We’ ve seen many organisations try to do all sorts of different things with AI and it’ s really difficult to see the benefits that’ s actually bringing.”
This disconnect between ambition and outcome is why Coupa is doubling down on a vertical approach to AI, says Peter,“ We are really focusing on the vertical approach to AI within what we’ re doing within the Coupa platform.”
Agentic AI: beyond automation The term Agentic AI has become central to Coupa’ s strategy. Unlike traditional automation or generative tools, Coupa’ s agentic framework – with its portfolio of Navi agents – is purpose-built for the spend management vertical.
“ It really is focused on driving business outcomes across spend management processes,” says Peter. These agentic systems learn from real transactional data – billions of interactions flowing through Coupa’ s US $ 8tn communityspend dataset – and use that intelligence to deliver recommendations, surface risks and optimise processes.
“ From an agent perspective, I think it’ s changing the way buyers and suppliers will interact with each other,” Peter continues.“ There are rules and controls built into the Coupa platform to make sure that there’ s always a human in the loop. Agents aren’ t just running away doing things on their own.”
This“ human-in-the-loop” design is fundamental to Coupa’ s philosophy of trustable AI – a safeguard that ensures decisions remain transparent, ethical and aligned with customer expectations.
“ Agents aren’ t just running away doing things on their own. There’ s always a human in the loop”
Peter Truman,
Senior Director of Technical Architects, Coupa
Breaking down silos and connecting the enterprise Most organisations today suffer from fragmented systems and data silos that obscure visibility and slow decisionmaking.“ Every organisation will have multiple applications doing multiple things, having data stuck in those and it’ s quite difficult to bring that data to control the process that’ s going on elsewhere,” says Peter.
Coupa’ s agentic AI tackles this by connecting to other systems, retrieving relevant data – such as available budgets – and orchestrating workflows accordingly.“ It’ s about connecting the broad organisation, both the organisation internally and the external organisation and bringing that together,” he explains.
The platform doesn’ t just automate tasks, it uses data to generate insights about supplier performance, contractual compliance and pricing anomalies. The result is a more unified, intelligent ecosystem that bridges buyers and suppliers with shared context and smarter collaboration.
procurementmag. com 57