Today’s post is by Ronald D. Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc
I have talked about the potential impact of Ai on procurement departments and jobs in the past. Most recently in a post titled Watch out procurement professionals Here comes Artificial Intelligence
So, today I was reading a report on FOXBusiness by Bradford Betz titled Walmart using AI to negotiate cost, purchase terms with vendors in shorter timeframe: In the report it states that “The AI chatbot has helped Walmart conduct negotiations with 2,000 suppliers simultaneously, the company said.”
The chatbot was developed by the California-based company Pactum, to negotiate smaller contracts with suppliers who provide the retail giant with the equipment it uses rather than the products it sells.
While Ai and machine learning are moving at the speed of light, I still believe that the savings generated in person reviewed and edited negotiations can be more effective and save more money in the long run. For the very large organizations where small percentage savings add huge numbers to the bottom line, it probably comes at a cost that is prohibitive to non-early adopters.
At SafeSourcing our average annual savings against all categories are in excess of 24% and that includes equipment. Just saying!
SafeSourcing is a Procure to Pay SaaS based provider of a number of e-Procurement solutions and associated white glove services that are part of our SaaS offered SafeSourceIt™ eSourcing suite .
For more information, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Services Associate.