The 2018 edition of the E-Buy Solutions Lounge confirmed the breakthrough of Artificial Intelligence technologies in business tools, to assist users through conversational agents, to entrust certain repetitive tasks to robots or to bring analysis to predictive and prescriptive. Or even allow the systems to act alone, to supplement the teams. A quick round-up by Acxias, who walked the aisles and followed some presentations for you.
Machine learning, neural networks, inference engines... Not a conference, not a workshop, not a carte blanche, not an expert opinion - or almost - without any question Artificial Intelligence (AI)), at the 2018 edition of the Solutions e-Buys show, held from September 24 to 26 in Paris. From the inaugural round table, which was devoted to strategies for digitalisation of the Purchasing function, stakeholders did not miss the opportunity to engage in this field. "To accelerate decision-making and increase purchasing performance, reporting and analytics capabilities are essential, and data crucial," said the sales manager of one of the leading publishers of digital purchasing solutions. "In this sense, we are actively working on bots and artificial intelligence." Sharing this approach to value creation through data, the general manager of operations for one of its competitors stated that "AI is sprinkled in functions such as the invoice control process and reconciliation with finance, and in the procurement process." On the ground, in fact, beyond the chatbots and a few pilots in the field of supplier risk management, use cases are still often limited to the billing-payment chain, with mainly image and text processing.
Without for mentioning the three cornerstones of a successful purchasing directorate (management of suppliers, contracts, files/projects), the product manager of a third specialized publisher recalled that artificial intelligence may not be offered native in purchasing solutions. "These are technologies that bring a lot, including by interfaced with specialized applications," he said, supported in his approach by the president and founder of an e-buying start-up, who believes that "the trend is towards open, interconnected and interoperable solutions." In advance of the deployment of AI, Robotic process automation is the other great innovation of the moment, to entrust software robots to perform repetitive and tedious tasks. « RPA, like artificial intelligence or even dematerialization, is one of those technologies that simplify and optimize the supply-to-pay chain considers the Director for Southern Europe of another platform. And even, more precisely, "low value-added tasks, in particular to automatically dematerialize and reconcile invoices and orders," added the European market manager at a competitor, before being corrected by another interlocutor: "We must not limit ourselves to administrative and financial operations, but to offer RPA native on all modules of solutions."
Many other speakers discussed "buyer valuation by machine," such as the "Good Practices" workshop on the use of Machine Learning and Prediction for everyday purchases, the roundtable "Intelligently Measuring Supplier Quality" or a publisher's carte blanche dedicated to dematerialization and "automatic reconciliation of invoices" with indirect purchase orders. Not to mention the presentations of the AI Business Symposium, in particular the "Focus" dedicated to purchasing management, and the "Masterclass" addressing two strategic issues: "How to connect AI to business applications" and "The importance of datasets for learning?" Other innovative technologies mentioned at the show: the Internet of Things (IoT) and, above all, Blockchain. In particular, the "Supply Chain Financing" roundtable showed how the use of "Smart Contracts" in an integrated way in e-purchase solutions could help secure the issuance of orders and trigger the payment process as soon as possible. Other applications of the Blockchain purchases are said to be in the making at several publishers present at the show, such as verifying supplier information or securing contracts.