COUPA
Building AI businesses can trust: the ethical data moat Trust and transparency are at the centre of Coupa’ s AI development. The company has invested heavily in security and compliance to safeguard customer data.“ We have invested very, very heavily in our security and compliance programme to make sure all of the data that we look after on behalf of our customers is handled and managed in a way that organisations can trust,” says Peter.
Coupa’ s ethical framework extends beyond compliance – it’ s about explicit data governance.
“ We don’ t use personal information within our AI data moat. We don’ t use anything that can be traced back to a particular customer,” he explains.
The company’ s AI governance programme, which includes legal oversight, ensures that development decisions are both explainable and accountable.
Coupa’ s ethical data moat is one of its most powerful differentiators.
“ Our ethical data moat is built on nearly two decades of customerapproved, anonymised spend data”
Peter Truman,
Senior Director of Technical Architects, Coupa
Over nearly two decades, customers have granted express permission for Coupa to use anonymised transactional data – creating an unparalleled, privacy-preserving dataset.
“ It’ s absolutely our customer’ s data, but used in a way that you can never trace anything back to a particular customer. It’ s about spend management data – it’ s not data that’ s scraped from the internet.”
This ethical data moat enables Coupa to surface deep, trusted insights without exposing sensitive information.“ For pricing insights, it will show a range. It’ s not going to show that any particular customer is paying this for a particular item. Again, it highlights the low-risk approach of using this data.”
Coupa’ s community intelligence within in spend data is the foundation for real business value.
“ What we’ re basically doing is using that dataset to put our customers’ data to work,” Peter says. By comparing individual data to anonymised community trends, Coupa surfaces insights into supplier risk, pricing opportunities and performance anomalies.
“ If there are trends happening in the community – supplier risk, for example – it may flag that there are potential issues you might want to investigate,” he explains.
The system can also identify costsaving opportunities:“ It might show that you’ re paying far too much for a particular commodity or service, while others are seeing a much lower price.
60 December 2025