How has implementing Coupa helped to drive savings at Rolls-Royce? The biggest change for us with implementing Coupa was going from a number of disparate data sources, which were almost impossible to reconcile. We never really had a true version of the truth in terms of our total spend profile. With Coupa now, and particularly Coupa AIC and the AI capability that comes with that, we now have a very clear and very clean view of all of our spend data, which allows us to make much better spend decisions, resulting in much better savings performance.

Take us into what the operation looked like before Coupa then. So what kind of challenges or roadblocks were you encountering? Largely, we were a very regionalised procurement operation. Very reactive in terms of how we managed our spend, so acting on demand as it arose rather than being proactive in terms of how we managed it. Bringing in Coupa in terms of standardised processes has allowed us to deliver a much more efficient operating model, but again, as I said earlier, has allowed much cleaner spend data, which has then allowed our category managers to put in much more effective category strategies and make better sourcing decisions.

What about the impact of something like agentic AI? How has that helped your team think about AI agents? We ' re really early in our journey on agentic AI. Having something embedded into the Coupa platform, which we know and we have already as part of our IT ecosystem, is going to allow us to really start to accelerate our progress when it comes to taking advantage of some of the things that agentic AI can do for us. There ' s probably two main things when it comes to that. One is the natural efficiency benefits, but then secondly, the insights. We have so much data in Coupa, both from a spend perspective, but also a process perspective. Being able to use agentic AI to surface insights and recommendations on that is going to significantly speed up our improvement processes.

98 July 2026