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

Spend Matters is publishing a series of articles about procurement, supply and services trends for the year ahead from expert tech and services providers in the market.

We are 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:

Raj Aggarwal, Director of Product Marketing at GEP.

Procurement needs to think AI-first in 2024 and beyond

The generative AI wave of 2023 truly brought us into the AI economy, with companies realizing how advances in AI have the potential to transform key processes and workflows that underpin how they operate and generate value.

In 2024, as AI capabilities advance further, AI tools will automate more tasks, provide deeper analytics-driven recommendations and gain robust prediction capabilities that weren’t considered possible before. Naturally, businesses that have an AI-first approach (integrating AI into their core processes) stand to achieve competitive advantage while companies that don’t will face shrinking margins.

Today, for procurement organizations too, applying an AI-first approach has become imperative, especially in the source-to-pay process.

The era of intelligent procurement

We expect 2024 to be the year of intelligent procurement, driven by AI, automation and data analytics.

AI can help create greater efficiency and value across all source-to-pay processes, including spend analysis, opportunity identification, sourcing and contract management, category management, supply relationship management and risk management.

Generative AI, in particular, offers transformative potential in optimizing source-to-pay processes. Its ability to parse language, recommend and accelerate decision-making can make the source-to-pay process tremendously efficient. And the maximum value can be extracted from these new tools through strategic integration.

For example, in spend analysis, GenAI offers superior data normalization, savings opportunity detection, forecasting and natural language querying that makes deriving insights effortless.

In sourcing, the AI can rapidly analyze supplier options based on pricing, quality, sustainability and other factors to identify optimal partners, while also predicting performance to mitigate risk.

For supplier management, AI facilitates a 360-degree view of supplier relationships spanning products/services, contracts, certifications, evaluations and performance.

Additional areas where the AI delivers value include contract lifecycle management, procure-to-pay processes of purchase requisitions, invoice processing/reconciliation and payment automation.

AI-powered source-to-pay is the future

At GEP, we leverage proprietary AI algorithms to streamline all procurement processes. Our AI-first approach toward software development is helping us provide clients with end-to-end visibility, cost, supplier and market intelligence and predictive analytics.

Our AI-powered source-to-pay applications can drive a lot of value and efficiency for our clients by making processes smarter, faster and more proactive. Enterprises can achieve highly accurate demand and spend forecasts by tying together historical data, predictive data from real-time intelligence and other sources. More accurate forecasts allow for better planning, inventory management and mitigation of various supply chain risks proactively.

As a company focused on developing AI-first solutions, we are committed to exploring and seizing every opportunity offered by AI. These AI-powered source-to-pay innovations will empower our clients to balance cost, risk and sustainability and become more agile and resilient.

Many thanks to GEP, and you can read our in-depth analysis of GEP here.

Read our senior analyst’s take on the key themes from the series here.

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

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.

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