Coupa Inspire 2022: Community takes center stage in strategy; new product announcements

Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn presented at Coupa Inspire Americas 2022 yesterday, April 5, in Las Vegas — the company’s first in-person conference since 2019. Approximately 2,300 attendees were present for his opening speech of the day, which centered on the evolution of industries and how innovations over time in the film industry mirror Coupa’s advancements in business spend management and procurement.

Bernshteyn’s speech highlighted what have been the most prominent themes of Coupa Inspire 2022 so far: a focus on the future and the power of community. Bernshteyn argued for three steps in the innovative process: foundational innovations, unified capabilities and inspired communities.

Using the film industry as an analogy, Bernshteyn first outlined foundational innovations: the moving picture itself, as well as the introduction of sound and color. Unified capabilities included improved cameras, special effects and modernized sound. And finally, inspired communities brought new, non-movie mediums such as interactive livestreams and mass-disseminated user-created content.

Bringing Coupa in to complete the metaphor, Bernshteyn likened foundational innovations such as sound and color in the film industry to the overall process of capturing spend in key areas (procurement, payments, expenses, invoicing). Unified capabilities like improved equipment and modernization in film correspond with creating more value out of spend capture by connecting areas such as supply chain, finance, procurement, risk, sourcing, treasury and an app marketplace to surround the general spend analysis.

The “inspired community” aspect, which Coupa has hailed throughout Inspire 2022 as the next step in its innovation journey, revolves around an increased emphasis on leveraging community resources throughout the Coupa network. Most prominent is Coupa’s Community.ai, which combines human connections with AI to amplify community intelligence and prescriptive insights on the $3.3 trillion in spend running through the BSM platform.

For example, through using Community.ai, a Coupa user will be encouraged not simply to evaluate their company’s own spend and/or analytics in particular areas, but also to compare against community metrics for holistic performance benchmarking (e.g., in Coupa’s source-to-pay process data mining). Moreover, Community.ai users will gain other advantages such as pricing intelligence gleaned from the community (e.g., ocean freight pricing), pre-negotiated rates (i.e., via Coupa Advantage), group sourcing events (Source Together), peer-to-peer events and more. In the long run, Coupa’s focus on inspired community should improve the general collaboration and maturity of its customer base.

New features announced at Coupa Inspire 

Coupa also announced new features to address ESG, supply chain risk and inflation challenges:

• Coupa now supports Scope 3 emissions dashboards and supplier diversity insights that extend to tier 2 supplier diversity spend. These new capabilities extend Coupa’s Sustainable BSM toolkit to over 80 capabilities across the platform.
• Additions to supply chain risk include supplier risk data in supply chain modeling and AI-based algorithms for recommendations with respect to transportation modes and routes based on specific business needs.
• As for inflation-based enhancements, Coupa has also introduced bid price insights (via Community.ai) and supply chain financing to make for more flexible payment terms.

Clearly, Coupa is pushing its platform forward to address the issues of the day — namely around resilience, sustainability and inflationary pressures. Yet, these are additional burdens thrust upon businesses already facing core digital transformation challenges yet to be overcome, such as rationalization of disparate and dirty supplier data, ensuring adoption/success of end-to-end S2P deployments and the like. While Bernshteyn’s presentation did touch upon areas that are becoming more pervasive throughout the market, the aforementioned challenges are also top-of-mind for businesses. In the coming days at Inspire, we’ll be keen to see how Coupa connects its expansive vision of the future with the state of procurement today, both the burning platforms of 2022 and the existential challenges that recur.

Stay tuned for more coverage from Coupa Inspire 2022, both here, on our main site news page, and on Spend Matters PRO for deeper product analysis.

Coupa Inspire EMEA takes place May 16-18 in Berlin. Find out more here and look out for our analyst coverage during the event.