Scott Bowler, VP Sales, New Business North EMEA, Icertis
Tell us a bit about you and your role I’ m Scott Bowler, VP of New Business Sales at Icertis across Northern EMEA. My team essentially covers everywhere outside central Europe and we work heavily with SAP across those regions.
For anyone less familiar with Icertis, can you give us an overview of the company? We’ re the market-leading contract lifecycle management vendor – we term it contract intelligence. We essentially founded this technology 16 years ago out of a piece of work with Microsoft. Microsoft was customer number one for us and we’ ve grown to be the largest player in the market, with a real focus on enterprise customers. We help customers with global scale to drive value from their contracts across the business.
To what extent is AI playing into what you do at Icertis? We’ re an AI-first business. Our deliverable to customers is helping them operationalise their data out of contracts. Everyone has a corpus of contracts – tonnes of PDF documents that traditionally people have manually read to extract information from.
Can you give us some success stories of AI implementation? A large telecommunications company in the UK recently brought two businesses together. Leveraging our technology and the AI within it, they were able to find US $ 35m of contract value across suppliers that they could immediately strip out of the business – a significant saving against the synergies they were looking for from that acquisition. We have a large German automotive client managing something like half a million suppliers. Across that volume, we’ ve been able to reduce their contract cycle times by 80 %, essentially helping them not only write contracts faster, but drive cashflow more effectively.
Why are events like SAP Now AI London so important? Our technology is enterprise-wide. If we look at procurement, typically technologies go very surface level on extracting data from contracts and giving people understanding. Events like these help us get closer to users and really show them the depth of capability that our platform and the AI that’ s inherent in it can deliver – helping them negotiate terms faster, drive cost savings out of their existing contracts and reduce the risk they have in their contractual positions.
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