A $10T bet: Coupa leverages data to build its case for AI and autonomous spend management

At the tech world’s poker table, Coupa Software Inc. is betting that $10 trillion in cumulative spend gives it an edge in artificial intelligence. Who’s to say it’s wrong?

That’s how much Coupa’s executives say has been run through the company’s platform for the 20 years it has been offering business spend management and supply chain services. Coupa, which was taken private by Thoma Bravo in an $8 billion deal in 2022, plans to leverage its two decades of proprietary transactional data to train AI models on real-world business activity that encompasses economic cycles and entire industries.

“This is the stair-step change that the world is operating in,” said Chief Executive Leagh Turner. “We are maximizing the power of our community data over 20 years.”

Unleashing agentic AI

Turner spoke during the keynote session at Coupa Inspire in Las Vegas on Tuesday, during the unveiling of several new offerings designed to facilitate the creation and deployment of AI agents in the enterprise.

The company announced Coupa Compose, an enterprise-grade platform to build, deploy and orchestrate AI agents across procurement, finance and supply chain, with outcome-based pricing that prioritizes ROI. It includes Navi Agent Studio, a no-code resource where business users can build and configure custom AI agents, and additional domain-specific agents for tasks such as Sanctions Risk, Autonomous Opportunity Analysis and Scenario Ranking.

“We’re going to unleash the customer to be able to build an agent set that fits in with their roadmap,” Bill Wardwell, senior vice president and general manager of financial operations at Coupa, said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “Our strategy is tech, but it’s also about thinking through the customer adoption.”

To enable broader AI adoption, Coupa also launched Catalyst, a hands-on offering that embeds engineers and solution architects directly into customer teams to accelerate time-to-value for AI. Catalyst highlights one of the nagging issues facing the tech industry as it rushes to provide all the AI that customers can handle. Some users are not sure exactly how to begin.

“The Catalyst piece is the full recognition that it is not enough for tech companies to build the technology and assume the customer is going to consume it,” Tricia Miller, senior vice president of product marketing and chief evangelist at Coupa, said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “Now our customers will understand the value.”

Sea change for procurement

Behind Coupa’s announcements this week are signs that AI is beginning to transform a number of key business functions, including procurement. In a session during the Coupa gathering, Forrester Research Senior Analyst Jeffrey Rajamani presented evidence that AI is making inroads across the source-to-pay cycle, where agents can scan the market for the best suppliers or pricing for a specific material. “AI is going to transform procurement completely,” Rajamani said.

One of the ways this transformation is emerging can be found in the field of contract management. AI agents are beginning to draft contracts and negotiate terms autonomously using predefined thresholds.

One of the firms putting this to use is the biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca plc, which generates over $20 billion in annual spend. The firm is using Coupa and the procurement negotiation tool Pactum AI to build an autonomous contract negotiation platform. The AI procurement solution has been in use for less than three weeks, according to Lidia Korbel, procurement director at AstraZeneca.

“I think we will learn more about the use cases in the next couple of months,” Korbel said. “We have to look at new ways of generating value for the business.”

AstraZeneca’s example also illustrates the very early nature of agentic AI in basic business processes, and companies are not ready to hand agents the keys to the kingdom just yet. What Coupa is seeing is AI being applied to what is known in the industry as “tail spend,” generally 20% of a company’s expenditure that is spread across a high volume of low-value and infrequent purchases. Typically, 80% of transactions account for 20% of the spend.

“Customers are early in the adoption,” said Coupa’s Miller. “AI is really getting to the point where it is actually executable. They will use agents in strategic sourcing to act on the lower spend.”

Acquisition for transactional intelligence

Along with agentic AI, Coupa is also taking steps to extend its automation technology to complex invoicing and document processing. On Tuesday, the company announced its acquisition of Rossum Inc., an intelligent document processing or IDP firm.

The integration of Rossum will bring Coupa an AI architecture that provides transactional intelligence powered by a proprietary domain-specific model trained on tens of millions of documents. Coupa envisions that combining its Navi agentic fleet, with Rossum’s IDP will benefit customers in their entire source-to-pay process.

“Our customers are looking for better ways to leverage technology and agentic frameworks,” Coupa’s Wardwell told SiliconANGLE “We see a ton of benefit in the invoice automation space.”

Business automation is proving to be a natural use case for early AI adoption, and Coupa’s latest releases demonstrate the market potential for technology that can quickly demonstrate return on investment and productivity gains. Based on the customer comments at Coupa Inspire this week, companies see the potential, despite clear signs that widespread adoption is still a ways out.

One certainty is that agentic AI will be part of the equation. When asked during a panel session what next steps customers saw with the adoption of autonomous technology for business processes, Dennis Fay, head of procurement for NFI Industries Inc., put it succinctly: “Agents, more agents,” Fay told the audience.

Photos: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE