How Fairmarkit is Educating Big-Name Businesses on Gen AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its more advanced offshoot, generative AI (Gen AI), are transforming almost all industries, with the procurement function also undergoing revolutionary changes thanks to the technologies. While many companies claim newly-established tools will transform their operations, these solutions are of little use if teams are not educated on how to responsibly and impactfully apply Gen AI to procurement activities. 

AI is now vital to staying competitive and increasingly used to complete routine tasks, enhance decision-making through data-driven insights and optimise supply chain management. Gen AI has demonstrated success in areas like summarisation, content creation, classification and data analysis.

Employers may ask, ‘Where are my employees spending most of their time? Do the tools they use today offer capabilities to automate tedious actions? Do the tools they use provide just-in-time augmented information to support more strategic decisions?’. If the answer to these questions is no, it may very well be the perfect time to invest in Gen AI-powered capabilities.

However, as AI becomes more and more intertwined with everyday activities, it’s crucial that procurement professionals are equipped with the knowledge and skills to leverage relevant tools effectively. Those who do so will be better positioned to drive efficiency, innovation and value within their organisations. It’s time for leaders to invest not only in technology but also in their teams, empowering them to harness the full potential of AI in a responsible fashion. And that’s where Fairmarkit comes in. 

Fairmarkit: Leading responsible Gen AI adoption

Fairmarkit, a cutting-edge procurement automation platform, specialises in optimising tail spend management through the power of AI and machine learning. Erin McFarlane, VP of Operations at Fairmarkit, is working with leaders representing major players, including BP, Snowflake, Emirates, ServiceNow and Boeing, to educate them on the responsible and impactful application of Gen AI within their procurement functions.

The Fairmarkit team collaborates closely with customers to implement Gen AI throughout the entire “need-to-award” process of procurement. This includes guiding users to purchase from the correct channel, outlining requirements and creating scopes of work, crafting RFP and RFQ events, creating summaries and assisting with awarding contracts. Rather than simply investing in Gen AI in a bid to keep up with industry trends, Fairmarkit ensures it is both useful and effective. 

Taking a security-first approach, Fairmarkit is built with security principles in mind. When it comes to Gen AI, the company does the necessary groundwork to ensure no customer data is ever used to train or retained by foundational models in any way.

Educating leading organisations

Erin emphasises that Fairmarkit deals with highly-sensitive cases, stressing the importance of customers understanding the risks and opportunities that Gen AI poses. 

“Customers should always be well-educated about how any of their data is accessed and if the data they’re sending to a Gen AI system is used to train it,” she says. “We work together with our customers to build the business cases, ensuring humans are in the loop where required to balance accuracy and the highest level of output.”

Fairmarkit maintains that exploring Gen AI simply for the sake of it will not result in the business outcomes that senior leadership desires. Ultimately, this is a single tool in a large toolbox; there will be situations where it’s a “great fit” and others where it isn’t. 

Erin stresses that leaders should seek an outcome-focused, well-defined scope: “By taking a ‘jobs to be done’ approach and seeing where in the workflow Gen AI has a material impact, customers maximise value while reducing risk.”

Automating routine tasks with Gen AI

Erin believes too much of the procurement function’s time is spent guiding users through complex processes, evaluating long and intricate internal and external documents and sifting through data to find insights – all to make sure each case they work on has maximum impact. 

“As a result of constrained resources and cumbersome tools, much spend goes unmanaged or is directed to ‘preferred’ suppliers with limited competition and oversight,” she adds. 

“Gen AI won’t automate the strategic reasoning and decision-making that makes us human. But it will help us gather everything together within mere seconds, enabling us to craft the right strategy using data.”

Enhancing decision support in procurement

One of the main reasons businesses are adopting Gen AI is for its ability to summarise unstructured data, guiding stakeholders or procurement teams down the best possible path.

Erin explains: “It can summarise activities in real-time while taking all historical context and past learnings into account. Whereas humans usually aren’t able to retain all the information and make gut decisions, Gen AI can point back to historical data points and suggest reasonable decisions based on what has or hasn’t worked in the past.

“Again, we humans are best at reasoning – let’s leverage this data superpower to avoid spending our time gathering all the data, and instead focus on the action itself.

“As with everything in procurement, professionals should focus more on strategic activities. Let automation and Gen AI handle the repetitive and non-complex tasks, providing insights and guidance for strategic decision-making.”

Implementing Gen AI in procurement with Fairmarkit

Fairmarkit has implemented Gen AI across several use cases. The first is in the procurement intake module, which helps business users navigate the purchasing process, followed by defining requirements and the scope of the required work. During the sourcing process, users can leverage Gen AI to help write their RFPs and evaluate supplier responses. Enterprises are also using generative AI to classify categories and detect data errors in automated events.

Fairmarkit is a global autonomous sourcing platform that proved the right choice for Boeing.

Tiffany Andrews, from Boeing’s Indirect Procurement Center of Excellence, says: “It pulls all of our trends from our old work system and our current system and [performs] an evaluation of all of our data, of our spending trends... it’s a great defence when having that strategic conversation on what you’re buying with your leadership because it grabs all of that data for you.”

Nicholas Wright, Head of the Procurement Digital Garage at BP, adds: “Fairmarkit has allowed us to do the same amount of work but with fewer people. What we’ve been able to do is repurpose those people onto more high-value tasks as opposed to transactional day-to-day activities.”

What next for Gen AI in procurement?

Erin is keen to point out that Gen AI is a tool rather than a strategy. 

She concludes: “As with every shift in technology, procurement teams will no longer look at the underlying technology but the ‘job to be done’ and ‘outcome to be delivered’. That’s what’s going to get funded and be successful – not Gen AI for the sake of Gen AI.

“Ensure your data is safe, understand your core pain points and how the solutions align, and look at technology holistically – how it’s making procurement better, faster and stronger – not whether it’s using the latest flashy technology.”

To read the full story in the magazine click HERE

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