GenAI Sourcing Intake is LIVE with Several of Our Fortune 100 Customers
Tech changes fast, and now with Generative AI, it changes even faster. Companies are increasingly adopting and evaluating the potential of Gen AI and are racing to integrate it into their operations. With the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding new initiatives, it's crucial to define what success looks like and how adding new functionality aligns with goals.
At Fairmarkit, when it comes to our GenAI beta, we worked backwards, starting with what would deliver the most value for our existing customers. We brought them in and unpacked barriers they have to sourcing more transactions and spend through our platform (more sourcing = more value to the business and supplier community). A few key themes that jumped out:
- Sometimes procurement catches requests too late in the process to source
- Sometimes procurement doesn’t receive enough information for sourcing
- Frequently, end users email or call procurement directly when they want help sourcing, which then leads to weeks of back-and-forth collaboration before an event is sent out
- People don’t like creating sourcing events in an RFP platform manually (so they rarely use them)
- It’s near impossible for business users or procurement to remember how to perfectly follow all the procurement procedures and policies when it comes to buying (especially as they change every year)
After we unpacked the above and pressure tested the points to verify that addressing them would help customers drive significantly more spend via our Autonomous Sourcing platform (RFQ, RFP, RFx), we broke them down into three core pillars.
The business user experience
How can we make the experience of sharing their “intent” with procurement easier and more intelligent using GenAI.
The buyer experience
How to make the collaboration with the business user on their “intent” streamlined and amplified with GenAI.
Creating a sourcing event
How to automate and add intelligence to the process of generating a sourcing event taking into consideration multiple internal and external data assets.
From a high level, as a company, we’ve been hyper-focused on our customers' Autonomous Sourcing journeys from the starting point of an event being created. Insight from our GenAI beta customers was to extend that intelligence to the end user, especially relating to requests for more complex goods and services - resulting in procurement engaging with more spend via our sourcing functionality. Net-Net: GenAI native Sourcing Intake (with a more fun, official name to be shared in the future).
We’re still in the early days since launching the beta last week, but we already have multiple F100 customers live and several more joining in the coming weeks. What’s been the most interesting to us, is how eager teams are to share new GenAI ideas, data, and suggested changes, and how it comes in from all levels of the organization. We’ve seen several non-executives shine and step into their own when it comes to leading the charge internally (obviously with executive support and buy-in).
Once we’ve learned more from beta users and are closer to our GA launch, I’ll share a video on the current capabilities, and a breakdown of our 3 and 6-month product roadmaps. And I have to call out that historically we’d talk about 1-year and 3-year roadmaps, but given the pace of change in this area, that would be as useful as a space heater in the desert.
