Coupa Inspire 2025: New announcements on agentic AI, user experience, and more

Coupa CEO Leagh Turner presented at Coupa Inspire Americas 2025 on Tuesday, May 13 in Las Vegas — the company’s 12th annual Inspire conference. Nearly 3,000 attendees were present for her opening speech, which elaborated on Coupa’s recent performance and future vision.

Turner noted that Coupa had over 1,500 customer go-lives and expansions in 2024, and that the platform now cumulatively manages $8 trillion in community spend. The discussion of this metric year-over-year is a Coupa Inspire staple — last year it was $6 trillion, in 2023 it was $4 trillion, etc. The impressive $2 trillion expansion of Coupa’s platform-wide spend under management is especially notable considering that Coupa leverages much of its application data, namely in its core Business Spend Management (BSM) application suite, to provide community-powered insights (i.e., where Coupa customers opt-in to have their anonymized data aggregated and re-purposed to inject back into the applications with a goal of increasingly using AI to generate impactful insights from that data).

Accordingly, Turner said that Coupa is “…not really a software company — it’s a community.” She connected this theme to Coupa’s vision of building the network that powers the future of trade. The focus on business/commercial ‘trade’ versus just supplier spend was a clear signal to the market of a B2B focus on supply chain (and direct spend) and finance integrated hand-in-hand with procurement.  Coupa also hedged its branding bets though with its “autonomous spend management” terminology which focuses on automation without getting drawn into the market obsession surrounding true AI agents. The firm also extended its vision out to its view of a business network as a “living, breathing, two-sided, autonomous global trade network” (this quote is taken from Coupa’s white paper that’s accessible here).

New solutions and features

Coupa’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, Salva Lombardo (a senior procurement product executive that came to Coupa from SAP) announced many new features and even an acquisition. The overarching theme of his presentation was AI, especially agentic AI. In fact, he even said that Coupa is “… no longer only an app company,” but “a data-driven agentic AI company.”  

We’ll offer a deeper assessment of that statement (much of which hinges on how one defines ‘agentic AI’  — e.g., agentic workflow vs. true AI agents) in a future analysis, but suffice to say that Coupa is doing very well selling its expanding portfolio of products. This includes Coupa’s acquisition of category management specialist Cirtuo, which will lead to even deeper support for Coupa customers around category strategy and planning. It will of course need to be integrated into other category-related aspects of Coupa’s solutions (e.g., within sourcing execution processes). Read more about the Cirtuo acquisition here.

Lombardo extended Turner’s message about combining Coupa’s community with AI and agents to support the future of trade. He reinforced Coupa’s role not just as a spend management solution, but as a platform that is designed to handle immense scale and complexity. This is being addressed via new features spread across four primary product pillars: AI, buyer, supplier and collaboration.

The AI Pillar

The AI pillar focuses on building an “AI agent-native engagement layer,” although no announcements were made regarding the development of true AI agents — i.e., agents that can autonomously understand goals (and context) to then perform reasoning, reflection, planning, cross-agent coordination, reliable tool use, error recovery, learning, etc. That being said, we do not expect any provider to have all of this cutting-edge capability yet in a market that is decidedly complex and volatile. 

One aspect of this is the announcement of a new Coupa UI called Clarity 2.0. The new UI is very modern and clean in appearance, with key information prioritized for users. Of course, the UI is configurable, so organizations/users can determine which information is the most important to display. The AI aspect relates to the targeted flexibility for bringing in conversational/chat capabilities and cross-product data utilization within a common UX and process orchestration (e.g., tailoring a proverbial ‘front door’ intake experience beyond just an intelligent request form).

This brings up the topic of another AI-related announcement: the unveiling of Coupa’s dedicated intake and orchestration module in a space where Coupa is playing catch-up. The new capabilities help users — especially infrequent users that are most likely to require intake assistance — better make purchase requests based on configurable and dynamic forms, including conversational experiences. Although the initial focus is on a requisition-centric guided buying use case, the orchestration engine seems to be focused on elevating existing Coupa workflow management to support deeper process orchestration capabilities currently met through partners.

Agentic workflow orchestration is a broader topic that we will reserve for follow-on analyses, but it certainly includes the use of basic agents to integrate LLMs to endpoints such as ‘tools’ and to human users via chatbots and copilots such as Navi, Coupa’s AI assistant. Navi acts not just as a chatbot, but also as a copilot that helps guide the user throughout intake and other processes. For example, use cases supported directly via a conversation with Navi include the creation of sourcing events, interpretation of company policies, analytics support, and more.

Lombardo also announced the following agents available now:

• Discovery Agent — surfaces pending approvals or tasks based on user role
• Operational Agent — generates structured tables or outputs from chat prompts
• Knowledge Agent — answers policy or procedural questions using internal documentation

Agents that will be available in the near future include:

• Analytics Agent — delivers conversational insights with embedded visualizations
• Request Agent — auto-generates requisitions without user form entry
• Supply Chain Modeling Agent — recommends sourcing shifts based on market and KPI triggers to then help configure and run supply chain analyses

Other agents are also on Coupa’s roadmap, such as a supplier onboarding agent and a sourcing event setup agent. Coupa also plans to support a bring-your-own-agent model, allowing customers either to bring their own agents or leverage agents from Coupa partners (e.g., agentic AI startups, ‘agentically enhanced’ current partners, and all forms of service providers that are building out their own agent-based solutions) through an enhanced Coupa App Marketplace. Coupa already can integrate to partner applications through APIs, and is well positioned to leverage the emerging MCP (Model Context Protocol) to integrate an ecosystem of agents into its evolving UX. Coupa also uses an agent studio/builder to support development of pre-integrated Navi agents, but hasn’t yet released a productized agent studio builder similar to SAP Joule’s agent builder that is demonstrated here.

The Buyer Pillar

The second of the four product pillars, the buyer pillar, includes new features such as a Coupa-issued card for payments. The card, which can be physical or virtual, allows for quicker and easier buyer payments with embedded budget controls. It is expected to be in limited availability until September 2025. The Coupa Card is part of the broader Coupa Pay ecosystem, which enables global payments through an extensive partner network. This ecosystem spans bank transfers (with thousands of SWIFT, H2H and EBICS connections), money movers like TransferMate and Goldman Sachs, virtual card providers including Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and Brex, digital wallets such as PayPal and Venmo, check payments (digital and physical via Viewpost), and merchant agents including Stripe, Billtrust, Boost, and Paymode-X. Coupa Pay is particularly well-positioned for mid-market and upper mid-market organizations in North America, while also building presence across select regions in Europe. This comprehensive payment infrastructure reflects Coupa’s goal of becoming a central platform for intelligently orchestrating B2B payments across multiple payment channels.

Enhancements to other areas include sourcing, where organizations can now access multi-user workspaces for shared collaboration, contract-triggered sourcing events based on supplier performance/expiry, a sourcing optimization BoM integration for one-click sourcing directly from a BoM, and more. Coupa also updated its Rapid Network Explorer to deliver faster scenario modeling, along with support for in-cloud recalculations in order to allow procurement and supply chain teams to react to market changes with near real-time response. Again, this is consistent with Inspire’s theme of optimizing trade, but also to improve user-perceived unification across Coupa’s acquired applications (e.g., from Llamasoft in this case) using its evolving UX, community intelligence and agentic orchestration capabilities.  

Coupa also announced a redesigned supplier management module, specifically with an emphasis on a unified supplier 360 view. The view will now provide consolidated supplier data across financial, performance and risk metrics, as well as onboarding status, document visibility, embedded risk triggers, assessment workflows and more. The feature is expected to be released in early 2026. Coupa customers (and customers of SAP and others too) have felt the pain of supplier data fragmentation caused when supplier management applications are acquired to meet highly desired requirements for supplier qualification, onboarding, risk/compliance management, etc. 

The Supplier [Facing] Pillar

Coupa’s third product pillar, the supplier pillar, focuses on simplifying the supplier experience and helping suppliers get more value overall. Suppliers will have access to more customization, including an overall cleaner, modern look and feel to the supplier portal consistent with Coupa’s Clarity 2.0 rollout.

Suppliers will be able to better find and engage with buyers by creating indexable LinkedIn-like business profiles. Suppliers will also be able to get paid faster and optimize working capital from a central hub that tracks all payments and receivables. Suppliers will also be able to upload invoices into their supplier portals, with Coupa’s AI handling metadata extraction and PO matching to accelerate approvals and payments.

The Collaboration Pillar

The fourth product pillar, collaboration, features announcements that are spread around a variety of areas. One is PO collaboration, which will allow users to better understand where materials are in the order cycle with real-time supplier communication to avoid disruptions. Another is forecast collaboration, which streamlines and optimizes planning with real-time collaboration on forecasts and demand plans. 

Inventory collaboration will allow for dynamic inventory management for smooth replenishment when needed. Additionally, quality collaboration will allow organizations to manage quality control processes in order to prevent defects and deliver quality, from drawing to inspection data collection as well as reporting. 

Coupa also outlined a multi-phase roadmap to evolve these supply chain collaboration capabilities. In 2025, the focus is on foundational features such as planner and supplier workbenches, alerts, scheduling agreements and enhancements to inventory and quality collaboration. Looking ahead to 2026, Coupa plans to introduce a control tower, task scorecards, and more advanced PO and forecast collaboration tools. Further out, the roadmap includes support for multi-tier collaboration, back-to-back orders, returns and AI-assisted ERP integration, advancing toward real-time, agent-led orchestration across the supply chain.

Pivoting from product to platform

For years, Coupa has positioned itself as the buy side equivalent of Salesforce, but the latter has an underlying platform with Lightning and Einstein (and the same goes for SAP, ServiceNow and others). For Coupa to move beyond apps to an AI-infused platform, network and ecosystem, the formalization of the platform elements is critical. 

One move in this direction is a focus on the developers who will build the apps, agents, integrations, etc. As such, it was nice to see that Coupa announced its first-ever developer conference, DevCon, scheduled for 2026. The purpose of DevCon is to enable developers at customer and partner/SI organizations to build, extend and orchestrate Coupa using the Navi Agent Framework and Coupa’s App Marketplace. The aforementioned agent studio and bring-your-own-agent approach is relevant here, as DevCon will serve as a setting for organizations to share ideas and create agentic processes that are customized for their needs.

Overall, Coupa’s 2025 Inspire announcements were all connected by a commitment to AI and agentic frameworks to better and more rapidly serve customer needs. Coupa’s roadmap is loaded with agentic capabilities and broader support for areas such as supplier onboarding and strategic sourcing. The success of this approach will of course be dependent on execution, but Coupa, which is projecting over $1 billion in 2025 revenue, has clearly navigated the turnover of key executives in recent years and is continuing to grow consistently. Its agentic vision of the future is a clear response to market expectations for AI and represents an even greater growth opportunity.

Stay tuned for more coverage of Coupa, including more discussion on Coupa’s AI and platform, on Spend Matters.