How Coupa is Helping Firms Harness the Power of Agentic AI

As industry players feel the pressure to implement AI solutions, Coupa is providing answers and actionable steps to help companies revolutionise procurement, finance and supply chains – through the creation of a seamless, intelligent ecosystem for both buyers and suppliers.

With companies being handed mandates by leadership, teams across the procurement, supply chain and finance teams are being asked to create a list of the AI tools they are using or plan to use. But while there is a lot of buzz around AI, there are also fears and questions.

Coupa's new guide is teaching businesses what exactly agentic AI is, as well as how it can benefit businesses, their teams and the customers.

The dawn of intelligent automation

While AI agents have been around for some time, agentic AI is new, helping to combine the programmable accuracy of traditional software development with the capabilities of large language models (LLMs).

While LLMs have earned a reputation as revolutionary technologies, but with items trained on publicly-available data and set on a wide variety of tasks, they have also gained a reputation for inaccuracy.

Agentic AI is able to use the potential of an LLM, while taking away the main contributors to inaccuracy: bad data and undefined use-cases.

Coupa Navi, its agentic AI tool, uses the power of LLMs on specific tasks in a well-defined domain. Purpose-built agents to democratise AI at each step of the design-to-pay (D2P) process, driven by data and built on the trust of Coupa's community of over 10 million buyers and suppliers.

Navi unleashes nine purpose-built AI agents which have been created to make the life of end users easier – taking them to the information they need to complete their daily tasks quicker.

Plus, with Coupa's AI-native platform, agents can scale both quickly and holistically – introducing new features and capabilities to make the age of agentic AI an exciting one.

Beyond rules: The power of adaptive intelligence

Agentic AI goes beyond the rule-based logic of siloed solutions. It has the ability to integrate multiple data streams into its processes.

For example, it could consider both inventory levels and historical customer preferences to dynamically manage workflows in real-time.

Other key capabilities include:

• Real-time decisions: When conditions change due to natural disasters, market movements or regulatory changes, Agentic AI is able to adapt on the fly.
• Continuous learning: Agentic AI isn't perfect, but the same dynamism that allows it to adjust to changes in the environment also empowers it to learn from mistakes and sub-optimal actions, improving over time.
• Scalability: Agentic AI is modular and able to integrate into diverse systems — future-proofing itself against changing business needs.

Taking the gradual path to AI excellence

The implementation of Coupa's AI solution is built on its crawl, walk, run philosophy, reducing the chance of customers becoming overwhelmed. 

• Crawl: Start by identifying quick-win opportunities where AI can reduce manual processes in low-risk environments. Get a small subset of users familiar with the solutions.
• Walk: Expand AI to more of your power users and start surfacing recommendations from the Agentic AI.
• Run: Put AI to work making autonomous decisions and executing actions under the supervision of users who are now familiar with the system.

Reaching the level of autonomous intelligence demands a high degree of trust — and it's important not to assume your AI implementation will automatically get there.

Throughout the AI journey, Coupa wants teams to remember they are always in control. The agentic AI provider is building agents tailored to specific workflows and processes. 

Building trust through proven experience

While agent-based user experiences are nothing new, Coupa has been a leader in the spend management sphere for almost two decades. For as long as this, Coupa has been deploying and implementing AI for as long as that, with solutions, like its agentic AI, built from the ground up.

Christopher Fontana, Director of Procurement, Technology, at the Freeman Company, says: "I have a great relationship with Coupa. I know the person who developed my products personally and if I have a question, I can go ask them and I'll get a response. It's that type of relationship."

Coupa's powerful AI capabilities are fuelled by a community of over 10 million buyers and suppliers who have contributed to our extensive dataset. Combined with deep domain expertise, this ensures Coupa Navi is finely tuned to the daily needs of procurement, sourcing, supply chain and finance professionals.

Built natively with AI, the Coupa platform is hosted in a logically isolated network to ensure robust data security and compliance. Customer data is never sold and never used to train public large-language models.

Christopher adds: "Starting small worked well for our team — it built trust in both AI and the processes we developed."

The Coupa Navi portfolio is set to redefine business automation — bringing together trusted data, specialist knowledge and autonomous capability. Coupa is helping businesses streamline operations, make smarter decisions and accelerate sustainable growth.

In today's fast-moving and complex business environment, agentic AI will be the key differentiator — separating forward-thinking innovators from those left behind.