What procurement can teach us about GenAI

As more and more experiments in Generative AI (GenAI) struggle to show business value, a simple truth is becoming clear. People are misunderstanding the power of this transformative technology. 

When many people think about GenAI, they think about content creation. It’s easy to understand why, given the countless examples of stunning content splashed across the news and social media. To be fair, there IS something magical about the ability to create an image, an essay, or a song from a relatively simple prompt.

But the greatest potential for GenAI, particularly in a business context, is not about content. It’s also not about basic automation or a desire to replace humans, two other common mistakes. The real value is in how GenAI enables improved user experiences – experiences that deliver better business outcomes. For example, enabling business users to navigate very complex systems with ease or by supporting vigilance in a way that decreases risk without increasing user frustration. 

Reaping these benefits, however, requires a more nuanced sense of the place of GenAI in human-computer interactions. An industry taking the early lead in showing how this can be done effectively is one that might surprise you: procurement. 

Using AI to humanize the procurement experience
AI is not new to procurement. Procurement professionals have been successfully using natural language processing to automate document management, and they have used machine learning for things like demand planning, pricing analysis, risk detection, and to automate decision-making.

This early AI foundation as well as procurement’s inherent complexity is why it is such an excellent use case for GenAI. Even at a small or mid-size business, procurement processes can span disparate systems, data sets, and geographical or organizational boundaries. The larger the organization, the more complex the challenge. Layer in a desire for speed and agility with a competing organizational need for control and compliance, and procurement becomes a perfect storm.

This is exactly where GenAI’s true potential begins to shine, since it can mediate the relationship between humans and complex systems, like those found in procurement. Humans want to engage with systems in ways that are conversational, using vocabulary they understand, and in ways that are hyper-personalized. But the underlying infrastructure of procurement, such as ERP, S2P, and other transactional systems, need information in very standardized formats that are anything but user-friendly. Businesses must also ensure compliance with corporate policies and business rules that are not well-understood by most employees.

This tension between what humans want and the complex demands of systems and processes is the root cause of almost every challenge facing procurement today. It’s also why procurement is viewed with distaste by many business users. But what if the experience was actually …pleasant? 

Imagine if the only guidance someone needed to make a purchase request (one of the most common reasons people engage with procurement) was a website that asks a simple question: “What do you want to do today?”. From there, they describe what they want to do in natural language. Based on their input, they are presented with an intuitive set of steps to follow and are only asked to provide information that is relevant to their request and that they can reasonably be expected to know. No need to ask for commodity codes or GL codes. From there, they have full visibility into the tailored stages and steps that their request needs to go through, where their request is in the process and an estimated time of completion. The experience is generative, hyper-contextual, hyper-personalized, and the most efficient path for all.

This is the power of GenAI, and it’s not in the far-off future. Companies like ORO Labs are harnessing this potential today. 

GenAI in Action at ORO Labs
At ORO Labs, we are helping global companies address their biggest procurement challenges – enabling them to coordinate people, processes, and systems in a way that balances business needs with user expectations for a seamless experience. We offer a no-code procurement orchestration platform that leverages GenAI to humanize the entire procurement experience.

ORO is built to harness the power of GenAI and includes numerous features built in close collaboration with some of the world’s largest companies. At the heart of these innovations is a desire to improve the user experience for people at every stage of the procurement process, including removing or automating the manual steps that slow things down or introduce errors. These capabilities include intent detection, automated spend classification, buying channel guidance, supplier recommendations, PO/PR creation, and smart proposal reviews. Each of these features works seamlessly to guide people through the procurement process, making it as simple and user-friendly as possible, while ensuring that the appropriate company policies and procedures are being followed. 

Ultimately, the best approach to embracing any kind of emerging technology is to begin with a specific, well-defined problem and how that technology addresses the problem. It is a means to an end rather than an end goal itself. This is especially true for GenAI. The real value lies not in automating humans out of a process but in seeing them as central and integral. The key is using GenAI to create effortless experiences that people love.

For more information on how we are making the most of GenAI to humanize procurement and drive better business outcomes, you can contact ORO Labs here: