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Coupa launches Community.ai to help turn its vast customer network and data into actionable insights

02/02/2022 By

Today, Coupa announced the addition of Community.ai functionality to its solution for business spend management (BSM) so that its vast amount of data can be acted on by the people in the Coupa network.

Its source-to-pay suite now offers a more direct way to tap into the findings from the data created each day by more than 2,000 global customers and the $3+ trillion in total spend from its BSM community.

Check out Spend Matters’ 5-step “Procurement Technology Buyer’s Guide” for tech-selection tips.

“Community.ai gives our growing community of customers valuable business insights at an unparalleled scale and speed,” said Rob Bernshteyn, Coupa Chairman and CEO. “We’re not just imagining a better business community, we’re building one with our customers. And as our community grows, we believe it will continue to become exponentially smarter and more valuable for everyone that’s part of it.”

The spend management capabilities at the heart of Community.ai involve harnessing Coupa’s AI and connecting with people to create two functional areas:

  • Community Insights — This function relies on anonymized transaction data to help business leaders make better, faster decisions. Coupa gave these examples: pricing insights, process insights, early payment discount insights and community supplier search.
  • Community Connections — This function facilitates the connection of professionals across Coupa and its BSM network of people to share knowledge and “tap into greater savings. Coupa’s press release gives more details on several new features: Community People Finder, Community Updates and Community Messaging.

“Coupa is the first provider in the business spend management sector to actually win deals on the power of embedded community benchmarks for procure-to-pay,” said Jason Busch, Founder of Spend Matters, a procurement technology intelligence and analyst firm. “The extension of permission-based, opt-in community benchmarks to embedded performance feedback, operational support, prescriptive recommendations, and a social business platform across source-to-pay and adjacencies can help Coupa further differentiate its suite. We can’t wait to see how Community.ai continues to evolve.”

Coupa said the new features create a community by pulling together the BSM platform’s array of data and then use it to help companies “discover deeper insights, make better decisions and support mutual success.”

Also, Spend Matters has covered Coupa for years.

Back in 2018, Analyst Michael Lamoureux identified “community” as a key value proposition for Coupa, saying:

“The real power of the Coupa platform, and the real ability for the company to deliver on its promise of not only rapid deployment and rapid spend under management but also rapid savings realization, is the community intelligence it is building.”

Coupa’s S2P suite also competes in all 10 of our SolutionMap technology categories, even the VMS (SOW) area that ranks vendors in the contingent workforce space. And Coupa has been on our “50 Procurement Providers to Know” list for years.

Spend Matters PRO analysis posts also have focused on innovative topics — like community:

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