An enterprise digital procurement bot powered by artificial intelligence will allow users of SAP Ariba to manage key tasks with greater simplicity, efficiency and speed, from web applications or communication channels.
The announcement was made at SAP Ariba Live this week in Las Vegas.
“Intelligent bots are facilitating a whole new paradigm of interactions that allow people to be more efficient and smarter in what they do,” said Dinesh Shahane, chief technology officer, SAP Ariba. “We are investing in these types of applications and technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver a next-generation user experience for our customers that promises to transform procurement as we know it.”
The bot is designed to remove issues such as errors in supplier invoices or mismatches with business rules which can slow down the procurement process.
Through the bot, the company plans to enable buyers and suppliers to converse with their SAP Ariba applications as they would with Siri or Alexa. Using machine learning, the bot will be able to train and learn about a user’s preferences and a company’s policies and procedures, and guide actions in line with them to reduce errors and speed processing.
SAP Ariba plans to make this procurement bot as part of a portfolio of bot applications that SAP is developing by the end of the year.
