AI for Technology procurement — Boon or Bane for IT professionals?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and all of its variants are having a progressively bigger impact on our lives. But has AI reached the world of sourcing and procurement? Big names like SAP Ariba, Supplari, and Coupa — all are harnessing the power of AI to tackle a lot of the more complex aspects of sourcing and procurement like:

• Supply chain management
• Risk management
• Big data analysis

According to Pierre Mitchell at SpendMatters: “Much of the problem with AI is that it’s misunderstood as a technology area that’s somehow different and separate from day-to-day processes and technologies.”

This speaks volumes about challenges faced in its adoption. However, every challenge has its solution. We just need to find the missing nugget.

Talking about IT professionals, how far have they embraced AI in technology procurement?

According to Gartner, only about 7% of CIOs had AI identified as a priority in 2018, but by 2019, the number jumped to 40%. When the C-suite understands the benefits of AI, it becomes a top priority.

The areas in which technology procurement can make smarter with AI are:

Smart IT Asset Procurement

IT professionals need a centralized system which includes contract negotiation, contract terms and conditions, assessment of the deal and different financing alternatives for sourcing and procuring IT assets. In all these technology procurement areas, AI can discover abnormalities, patterns, and possibilities in a fraction of the time that a team of human procurement experts can.

Strategic Optimizations of Cost

Artificial intelligence-based contract management systems offer strategic cost optimization by reducing manual review time and delivering the contract to the right person at the right location, notifying each signer when the contract is accessible. With features like automatic reminders and free text searches across your contracts, intelligent CLM platforms can help you identify financial risks before they occur and throw light on opportunities, like cross-selling, upselling, or renegotiation opportunities.

Management of Complex Vendor Ecosystem

AI automates and improves many time-consuming tasks across source-to-contract processes and offers procurement experts additional insights based on extremely complex and large sets of data. Most commonly AI-based contract management solutions include numbers of pre-built templates and models to identify key clauses of interest. You can also configure and automate your processes as well as track and report on your vendors and spend.

Digitizing the procurement process with AI is a key for procurement leaders to get instant visibility into pending purchase requisitions, sourcing requests, and negotiations for expiring contracts. ServiceNow helps streamline your IT sourcing process with digitized workflows and provides you the ability to compare actual outcomes with service level agreements. You can automate end-to-end IT sourcing and procurement processes by eliminating the risk and unproductive work caused by traditional formats like spreadsheets, email, and error-prone manual intervention.

Read More: https://aavenir.com/tackling-issues-in-it-sourcing-and-procurement/

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