New Year Insights for the procurement solutions and services marketplace 2024: Coupa

For several years now, Spend Matters has been collecting and publishing a series of articles about procurement, supply and services trends for the year ahead from expert tech and service providers in the market.

This year we’re highlighting the customer demands, market movements and advances in procurement tech that are exciting the world of solution providers, how they expect them to shape the S2P landscape next year and how they plan to respond to them.

Our series runs from mid-December to mid-January, then our senior analysts will wrap up with their own take on the key themes that emerge.

In no order of preference, other than by the date they arrived in our inbox, today let’s hear from:

Donna Wilczek, EVP Strategy and Innovation at Coupa, spend management suite provider and one of Spend Matters 50 Procurement Providers to Know.

Operational efficiency, AI advancements and socially-conscious spending will be key business drivers

Coupa has a core philosophy of “none of us is as smart as all of us” and it’s with this spirit that our insights for 2024 are written. Summarizing Coupa’s face-to-face discussions with 400 innovative customers across the globe, here are some of our key predictions:

Operational excellence: Organizations will feel the impact of challenging macroeconomic conditions and will work to make every dollar matter. This will result in the increased deployment of business platforms to improve efficiency and reduce cost and third-party risk while increasing agility and optimizing financial health across spend, payments and working capital. It is predicted that procurement, supply chain and finance teams will increase their collaboration to improve operations through systems consolidation, increased user self-service and process orchestration that leverages data to automate and simplify user workloads.

Artificial intelligence (AI): Generative AI will make large leaps forward. AI will be used to automate tasks, make predictions and help businesses make smarter decisions. Businesses will increasingly take interest in where data to train large language models originates — especially around data usage rights, data protection and overall data security. In addition, government regulations around AI will need to be factored into business decisions concerning who gets what AI-powered feature in which part of the world.

Socially-conscious spending: ESG will remain a top priority in 2024 with many companies starting to see their 2030 net-zero commitments right around the corner. Businesses will also face increasing compliance pressure as new and expanded government regulations such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) force businesses to change faster. In 2024, they will reduce their environmental impact and improve their social responsibility while balancing the cost and effort to make these business improvements. Increasingly, businesses will move from simply reporting data to leveraging data to make smarter decisions (e.g. using supply chain digital twins to optimize supply chain networks for carbon takeout).

While insights are interesting, Coupa cares more about execution and shaping the future of procurement and supply chain management in 2024. To that end, Coupa has rolled the above customer-driven predictions into our 2024 roadmap of 350-plus features that will make these predictions achievable. For example, in the area of Generative AI, Coupa will leverage its $5T customer contributed big data set and 10-plus years in AI development to extend the hundreds of AI-powered features that already exist across the Coupa platform while using new Generative AI innovations to lead the market in guided user experiences, third-party risk reduction, contract intelligence, and natural language searching.

So, 2024 … are you ready for it? Coupa and our customers are ready.

Many thanks to Coupa for being a part of the series. You can read our senior analyst’s take on the key themes from the series here.

If you need to find the right procurement technology provider or service for your business needs next year, try Spend Matters TechMatch for a free rapid shortlist.

For granular analysis and comparisons of procurement technology solutions, subscribe to Spend Matters Insider.

Access Spend Matters dedicated ‘Artificial Intelligence in Procurement’ page for more AI insights.

As always, reach out to discover how Spend Matters can help with your new year commitments and wishes.