AI IN PROCUREMENT
RPA VS. COGNITIVE AI
“ When you are looking at a bottleneck in your procurement cycle, deciding between an RPA and a cognitive AI solution comes down to three factors.
1. Assess data complexity. Traditional RPA is effective for transactional, clear-cut tasks. Processes requiring context or judgment are better suited for cognitive AI.
2. Ruleset maintainability. Many companies make the mistake of using RPA for processes with constantly shifting business rules. This approach creates an endless, expensive cycle of fixing broken bots, whereas cognitive AI is built to adapt on the fly.
3. Make sure to look at data structure. RPA needs clean, predictable spreadsheets to work. If your team is stuck sorting messy invoices, digging clauses out of non-standard contracts, or trying to interpret unstructured supplier emails, a basic bot will fail. You need cognitive AI to make sense of real-world data.
The rule of thumb is simple: let RPA handle the repetitive tasks that require zero human judgment and use cognitive AI to tackle the messy data and actual decisions.”
– Rakesh Sancheti, Chief Growth Officer and Chief Business Officer for Manufacturing at Tredence Inc.