INTAKE & ORCHESTRATION

A lot of people see it as a way to avoid losing money. How can companies actually use something like scenario modelling to beat their competitors and grow during a crisis? We ' re undoubtedly in a very disruptive environment at the moment. Gartner just came out and said the average company is facing 17 disruptions a year that are highrisk, high-impact events costing millions of dollars. That ' s really what companies and executive teams are trying to guard against. I always chuckle because, in my career, I was always faced with a Chief Financial Officer. You set a budget and then you measure people against that budget, but it almost becomes irrelevant as soon as you go into a disruptive environment.

Given how volatile the market is currently, how do you go about creating and updating a model so that you ' re dealing with the challenges being presented right now? Coupa has over 200 patents on our different capabilities. They just received one a couple of weeks ago on – don ' t quote me on this – neuro-symbolic reasoning. It ' s basically an agentic tool that stops the optimisation model from hallucinating. AI is accelerating everything, but everyone generally interacts with AI as a large language model, which is really a word association game. With maths problems and large rational models, you can ' t apply the same word association game, so they hallucinate more. This latest patent stops the hallucinations.

Give us an idea of what you think scenario modelling is going to look like over the next 12 to 24 months, as agentic AI continues to evolve. What ' s the next evolution for it? I think it ' s going to go in a couple of different directions. Today, we have planners in the loop of network optimisation. In the future, I think they ' re going to sit on the loop and act more as orchestrators. If you think about how you build a model and run scenarios today, you ' re changing policies. In the future, we ' re really going to be working with prompts, so you ' re going from policy changes to prompts. Instead of saying,“ There ' s a disruption in the Suez Canal. What are all the policies that are going to be affected?”, you can simply define that for the model and it will identify the relevant areas in your supply chain. It ' s getting much, much easier to interact with the models.

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