Industries are being transformed in procurement sector with the help of Artificial Intelligence. It is not wrong to say that Artificial Intelligence is a major future supply chain trend. To put it simply, experts in the field consider artificial intelligence to be the key driver for the success of supply chain management. The future being at stake is driving big corporations to invest heavily in this sector and as reported by Crunchbase about 4 billion US$ has been invested for the same in the United States alone. The abilities of artificial intelligence to enhance and automate decision making, renovate existing business models and help in constructing up a large ecosystem to make existing customer experience better has started an arms race of sort between software vendors. Mckinsey estimates that tech giants such as Google and Baidu spent some $20 billion on Artificial Intelligence last year. The mobile-centric and technologically motivated movement for Artificial Intelligence can help us deduce that how Artificial Intelligence’s functionality will help procurement experts to browse, pick, order and handle product services. The combining of patterns and other prescriptive faculties can prove to be a game changer in supply chain revolution letting people of higher faculties dedicate their energies to more pressing matters like strategic network design and capacity planning.

Two areas stand out for Artificial Intelligence

1. Augmentation :- a case where AI assists humans with their day to day tasks.
2. Automation :- a case where AI works completely autonomously

Strategic Procurement with A.I. Algorithms and Big Data Analytics

Current procurement procedures are creating piles and piles of data by combining various systems. But this data often does not translate into Big Data Analytics. By harnessing the potential of the Artificial Intelligence for procurement you can have an edge over the big data algorithms.

Chatbots

Conversational Interface often dubbed as chatbots are revolutionizing the procurement experience. By incorporating both voice and written dialogs that can intimate chatting with a real person. This provides an alternative to clicking icons and selecting syntax specific instructions using the data from other apps. Chatbots are revolutionizing supply chain by taking interaction to a whole new level of conversational commerce. Without any human intervention Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) can handle discovery questions can ensure delivery and provide a better customer service. This will revolutionize the overall procurement experience.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence is here to stay and as we have seen big corporations are pooling in resources to harness its potentials. It is essential that in this day and age of artificial intelligence procurement experts are schooled in these arts so they can harness its full potential in the procurement arena.