SAP Spend Connect Live Event debuts AI for Spend Management Solutions

⇨ SAP hosted its annual Spend Connect Live event in Vienna from Oct. 9th -11th.

⇨ SAP announced new business AI and user experience innovations for spend management.

⇨ Available in the first quarter of 2024, the new SAP Spend Control Tower solution is planned.

At its SAP Spend Connect Live event in Vienna, SAP announced new business AI and user experience innovations for its spend management and business network solutions. These innovations are aimed at helping control costs, mitigating risks and increasing productivity for SAP customers.

Available in the first quarter of 2024, the new SAP Spend Control Tower solution is planned to include advanced AI features and the ability to see across all spend to help customers uncover cost-saving opportunities and discover process improvements. Available now are new dashboards in the SAP Ariba Sourcing and SAP Ariba Buying solutions that will additionally give customers near real-time information within key process workflows, making it easier for procurement professionals to help make timely, informed decisions.

All of the spend data is rationalized in a unified data model as part of SAP’s next-generation data lake, the Supplier Data Platform, known as the backbone of all of SAP’s spend analytics. In addition to fueling the SAP Spend Control Tower, it also enables embedded spend insights in SAP applications and powers generative AI innovations.

In order to help procurement professionals build comprehensive and effective category strategies faster, the recently released ‘SAP Ariba Category Management’ solution will now be enhanced with generative AI powers. With the intention of saving category managers weeks of valuable time and increasing strategy validity, AI aims to jump-start the market analysis process and offer a suggested category strategy for procurement professionals to better refine and execute.

In an effort to help business users make faster and smarter decisions, SAP has also embedded AI-powered supplier risk assessment capabilities into its source-to-settle software, making risk assessment profiles an integral part of sourcing, contracting and buying solutions, helping users better determine third-party risks.

Muhammad Alam, president and chief product officer, intelligent spend and business network, SAP, said: “These are just some of the examples of how we are thoughtfully integrating generative AI technology with our market-leading spend management solutions to help our customers be more productive.

“As with all of SAP Business AI solutions, we are developing these new spend management AI innovations with security, privacy, compliance, ethics and accuracy in mind.”