AI in Supplier Discovery: Today

With this briefing on supplier discovery, we continue our series on AI in various source-to-pay technologies, which we started with AI in Procurement (Today Part 1 and Part 2, Tomorrow Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, and The Day After Tomorrow) and continued with our recent series on AI in Sourcing (Today, Tomorrow Part 1 and Part 2, and The Day After Tomorrow) and AI in Sourcing Optimization (Today, Tomorrow and The Day After Tomorrow Part 1 and Part 2). The goal of this series is to define what is available with AI today, what will be possible tomorrow, and where the future may take us.

But first we must remind you of the status quo: Artificial intelligence does not yet exist, in the strictest definition of the term.

However, if you define AI as "assisted intelligence" (systems that can automate repetitive and standardized tasks performed by humans) or "augmented intelligence" (systems that can learn from humans and their data to provide insights that lead to, or recommend, better decisions), then there are technologies out there today that meet that need.

Today, the mainstream applications of AI in supplier discovery (which are, sadly, few and far between) generally fall into two categories, which themselves have limited functionality, but, there is still some functionality and it is a beginning.