Xeeva
Transforming Procurement with Purpose-Built AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come a long way in a very short time. It is now the golden age of AI, where advancements come from voluminous sets of data, new algorithms being created, computing power, and the ability to carry out operations in the cloud at scale. But where does this leave procurement?

Today, there are numerous companies out in the market that are developing generic AI-based solutions to help tackle complex procurement activities ranging from handling procurement spend, processing purchase requisitions, automating sourcing events to managing supplier relationships. But for organizations to draw significant value from data, it is imperative to ensure that AI addresses the core issues that underpin procurement and spend management.

Vikas Shah, SVP Business Development, Products and Growth at Xeeva, explains that the company was founded as a result of this underserved market and realized that the existing procurement workflows and practices need a significant overhaul. “There is a need for a specialized AI-based solution—purpose-built for procurement—that addresses domain, granularity, and speed that can offer organizations insights into their procurement activities like never before,” says Shah.

Xeeva is focused on accelerating the advancement of procurement with its full suite of source-to-pay solutions that are powered by its patented domain digitization AI technology. “We were born with AI-first thinking and have been leveraging our technology to help organizations drive the best value for over five years now. With significant investment in category-specific data science models, we help companies unlock operational efficiency, savings, and cash – accelerating strategic business value contributions from their procurement functions,” remarks Shah.

Xeeva’s success in helping organizations is highly credited to its three patents. The first two patents cover techniques for rapidly classifying and enriching data records to improve data quality and consistency. The AI takes unstructured and fragmented spend data, scattered across various systems, and cleanses and categorizes it quickly – providing detailed, granular visibility into where and how an organization can control spend and maintain compliance. The third patent is an expansion of the previous two, covering the data enrichment process.

There is a need for a specialized AI-based solution—purpose-built for procurement—that addresses domain, granularity, and speed that can offer organizations insights into their procurement activities like never before

Once the data has gone through the cleansing and classification, Xeeva’s AI can enrich items down to the line level, allowing organizations to aggregate spend, automate frequently bought items, and eliminate price variance across millions of parts and services transactions.

According to Shah, many organizations today struggle with poor procurement spend visibility or lack it completely. “The majority of procurement spend data is imperfect—it is either poorly attributed, has missing fields, or only includes high-level information, which makes it nearly impossible to analyze and acquire any actionable spend insights,” he informs. Existing technologies in the market are able to improve the quality of procurement spend data to only about 30 to 50 percent at best.

To better highlight the effectiveness of Xeeva’s software, Shah shares a success story involving a client that was struggling with their indirect procurement data. “The client had only about 20 percent of the data that was deemed good or usable and they were making all of their procurement and sourcing decisions based on that data,” he mentions. Xeeva’s AI technology helped the client cleanse almost 80 percent of their data within days to become well-attributed at the item and category level. The client was subsequently able to analyze and identify new cost-saving opportunities in excess of $150 million to execute decisions to help drive immediate value.

Consistent with its goal of helping companies leverage procurement data and get the best value out of it, Xeeva is currently investing significantly in enhancing the capabilities of its software. “We aim to continue on this journey of building procurement software with specialized AI differentiation as we innovate to enhance and expand our use cases,” states Shah.