Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio
Spend management vendor Coupa today unveiled several new AI agents and other components towards its mission to create an autonomous fabric for enterprise buying and selling. In a product keynote at the company's Inspire conference in Las Vegas, Salvatore Lombardo, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Coupa, set out how these new agents are designed to immediately reduce manual effort through automation, while at the same time building towards the ultimate goal of fully autonomous procurement.
Briefing diginomica in advance of today's news, Lombardo adds that Navi, which made its debut at last year's Inspire as an AI assistant, now takes on an expanded role as the entry point to the platform's agentic AI capabilities. He explains:
Navi is the front door, the face of the agents... Navi will be the autonomous agent of the future, and it is done by adding intelligent agents underneath, which always will be the ones giving the right answer depending on the question you enter...
The platform itself has completely, as we are born-in-cloud, [made] a very quick turnaround into an agentic layer we are building, where Navi is the face and the future engagement layer.
Today's agent announcements include two new supply chain agents built on the supply chain design and planning product which grew out of Coupa's acquiaition of supply chain network design vendor Llamasoft five years ago. Currently in trials with early access customers, one helps to model supply chain networks, while the other is designed to help designers stay up-to-date with the intricacies of building supply chain digital twins, models and scenarios.
Three further AI agents are now generally available. An initial analytics agent generates custom data tables or simple charts in response to natural language requests — a more proactive analytics agent is already in the works, says Lombardo. A document discovery agent can now surface documents that are awaiting approval. And an upgraded knowledge agent is able to provide instant answers to questions about organization-specific policies governing sourcing and spend. More agents are on the roadmap in areas such as sourcing and supplier onboarding, and customers can also plug in third-party agents and assistants running on external platforms.
Other new AI-powered capabilities include transaction summaries, which surface critical information from requisitions, sourcing events, service sheets, and invoices; payment alerts to flag up anomalies and potentially risky payments; and process health insights, which identify underperforming approval workflows.
Supplier collaboration
Of equal importance in laying the foundations for a future autonomous procurement network are an expanded set of supplier collaboration capabilities. Complementing the existing collaboration around purchase orders and forecasts, there is now the ability to collaborate on inventory, with suppliers able to monitor stock levels at customer warehouses, helping to reduce safety stock levels and carrying costs. Further areas of collaboration will follow in future releases. Lombardo explains:
If the supplier is successful, the buyer is... That's why I'm so keen and I accelerated the offering of supply chain collaboration, because I see there's so much value that I'm offering tools on both sides to collaborate in the cloud.
This is a much deeper collaboration than was possible in past generations of e-commerce technology, he explains, when networks of buyers and sellers were simply matching transactions. He goes on:
If you now add all of this as connected, all in the cloud, and then you have suppliers and buyers working in the same application for certain value creation — quality collaboration, for example — then the e-commerce becomes really collaboration commerce. That's why I believe very much that we have the technology now to make it happen.
Trusted agents
But the immediate task is to build customer confidence in the agent technology that Coupa is rolling out. A key foundation for reliable AI agents is to have a trusted mapping of an organization's processes, and the policies and conditions that govern them. To this end, Coupa is introducing a product called Smart Intake & Orchestration. This is a tool that allows customers to map and refine their business process workflows, and which then orchestrates how those workflows are executed in the Coupa platform. Lombardo believes this will give customers confidence that, when they deploy agents, the agents will follow the documented workflows. He explains:
[I'm] saying, 'Hey, the first step is, do and model your business process management with us — the orchestration. You can still put a simple UI on top, but the point is, AI and the agents will learn from the process management steps you are doing. So whatever the agent needs to execute, they will take your [process] data.
He is also being careful to only release agents to general availability once they have proven their ability to do the job. The Coupa agent platform uses a variety of built-in internal test mechanisms to check the validity of every agent response before passing it back to the user. If it fails the tests, the agent tells the user it can't provide an answer. This protects customers from misleading information, but users aren't happy if an agent keeps on coming up blank. So before going to general availability, an agent's pass rate has to be above the 75-80% level. That takes a lot of additional training, says Lombardo, but it's necessary if the agent is to provide a good user experience.
My take
The vision that Lombardo mapped out when we first met last year — shortly after he had joined Coupa — is already beginning to take shape. There's a lot of ground still to cover, but the upgrade of Navi to become the access point for agent capabilities, the acceleration of supplier collaboration, the emphasis on mapping and refining business processes, and the growing family of agents, all add up to a coherent master plan for moving towards that autonomous network for collaborative commerce. The challenge is to keep customers moving along the roadmap, which means ensuring they can find value in the tools Coupa is able to put in their hands along the way. Their reaction at Inspire this week will be telling.