Coupa Inspire: Mike Quinn, CTO at DataMap

After being named Coupa's Innovation Partner of the Year, DataMap CTO, Mike Quinn, spoke to Procurement Magazine at Inspire 2026. 

He talked through the thinking behind the accelerators his team has built to sharpen the platform's reach into direct procurement.

Mike argues that the biggest barrier to real-time visibility across ERP, finance and HR isn't a lack of AI capability, but a lack of accessible, unified data.

His answer lies in specialisation: rather than one generalist agent trying to do everything, DataMap has built out task-specific agents, from treasury and category management to accounts payable, each focused on a single job and fed the right data to do it well.

We know about the need for real-time data across ERP, finance and HR. What's the single biggest challenge that's preventing this?

The single biggest challenge is having all of the data together and easy to consume. Whenever you set up your AI agents to consume the information, you've got specialised agents.

You might have an agent that acts as a treasury, a controller, a finance reviewer, an AP clerk, a buyer, a category manager, and they have to be specialised. AI is getting really good, and we've all been really surprised at what it can do.

But it also is amazing when it's very focused and directed at a particular task. If it's too much of a generalist of an agent, then it's not very good.

By having these specialised agents being able to access the data that's important to them, we can close the gap on that number one challenge.

You've built dozens of accelerators over the years to boost Coupa's impact. What specific problems do those tools actually solve?

There are dozens of problems that the tools actually solve, maybe hundreds. We've built about 25 different use cases to solve, and the number that's possible is innumerable.

One in particular that I would probably dial into is around direct procurement. In a lot of ways, Coupa is really expanding into the direct procurement space. And so, one of the things we've done with the Coupa platform is take a look at where all of the direct procurement touch points to develop those data feeds so that the agents are able to have all the information they need to consume it and be effective.

DataMap has just been named Coupa's Innovation Partner of the Year. Firstly, how does that feel? And secondly, why would you say DataMap stood out in that particular category?

It feels great. It's amazing to have a partnership with Coupa and to be able to work very closely across the entire organisation. It's a testament to the fact of how well we work not just with Coupa but with any company.

We see ourselves as team players. I'd say it makes me feel really proud of my team and really proud of my organisation, and really proud of the people, our partners that we work with, too, because without our partners and our team, we couldn't do it.