How Ivalua is Changing how Procurement Works With AI

Ivalua, one of the leading AI platforms for procurement, has announced its IVA Studio, which the company is calling a ‘fundamental’ new way for procurement teams to work.

The platform is built to work as a way to streamline AI agents, moving them away from atop fragmented data and disjointed systems, as the IVA Studio claims to allow procurement teams to perform any activity across the Source-to-Pay (S2P) process through a single agent.

Ivalua says that its IVA tool will know your data, follow rules set by the user and “get work done on day one”, as the IVA Studio tool works as an AI control tower, managing IVA’s skills, permissions, tools and MCP integrations.

A Unified Solution for Fragmented Systems

The company highlights the work of a category manager preparing to re-source an expiring contract; it says the person can ask IVA to pull the contract, benchmark against agreements, identify stronger suppliers, set up an RFx and launch the event, all in a single conversation.

It also says that an accounts payable team can have IVA validate incoming invoices against not just price and PO, but also against the harder-to-enforce contract terms buried in documents.

Franck Lheureux, CEO of Ivalua, says: “At Ivalua, we believe the future of procurement is not AI, it’s people using AI to deliver better and faster results. IVA, powered by IVA Studio, is a decisive step forward into a new era for procurement, one full of disruptive challenges and exciting opportunities.

“With IVA, procurement teams can focus on what they do best: building strategies and relationships, internally and externally. We are thrilled to lead this journey with our customers and partners.”

Ivalua says in a release for the tools that IVA works autonomously, in workflows and in the background. A supplier risk event can trigger IVA to surface every affected contract, open a PO, create a mitigation plan and propose qualified alternative suppliers. IVA “can do anything a user can and more”, as Ivalua says its entire S2P application is its knowledge source and toolset.

Redefining the S2P experience

The company says that procurement teams using the tool will gain a “truly intelligent, intuitive experience” – saying that the user experience is as simple as telling IVA what to do and IVA assembles the right skills, tools and knowledge for the task.

For complex work, IVA creates and orchestrates temporary sub-agents. Ivalua says that this is “the first complete S2P agent to follow the skills-based architecture frontier AI labs are converging on.”

The company adds that users do not need to build, orchestrate or select from a growing catalogue of agents. Instead, IVA understands all the data in the Ivalua S2P platform, can take any action as a tool and follows organisation-specific best practices through skills, with human-in-the-loop controls maintained.

Ivalua says that its AI technology and services combine to “ensure successful implementation, adoption and continuous optimisation”, while also believing that IVA will deliver value immediately because “it can execute any action a user can from day one.”

Ivalua says that “unlike competing solutions, there is nothing to integrate or configure. Over time, IVA gets smarter as organisations use it, encoding their expertise in skills and memory.”

With the belief that as teams grow to trust it, IVA can take on more autonomous work, embedded in workflows or running in the background, turning S2P into an automation engine.

Additionally, Ivalua and its implementation partners provide guidance, expertise and support services.

David Khuat-Duy, Founder & Chief AI Officer at Ivalua, adds: “Procurement teams have typically had to spend time building and configuring AI agents before seeing any results. Ivalua’s approach is entirely different: IVA accesses the Ivalua platform as its toolset and source of knowledge, so procurement can start getting value from day one, within a framework of governance that’s enforced by design.”

Built with governance and ecosystem flexibility

Governed by design

Governance is enforced at the platform level, not by the agent. IVA inherits the permissions of the user who invokes it and cannot exceed them. When IVA is operating autonomously in a workflow, it still has an accountable user whose boundary it follows and whom it falls back on for human-in-the-loop controls. Every action is logged with a continuous audit trail. AI works only where it is allowed to work and procurement leaders can prove it.

Expertise that compounds

IVA learns employee best practices: sourcing approaches, negotiation strategies and compliance rules as skills that IVA follows. Skills turn individual expertise into team capabilities, building institutional knowledge that compounds with every interaction. A new hire working with IVA operates with the benefit of the whole organisation's experience. IVA also maintains a memory of interactions, self-improving automatically.

Fitting into the AI ecosystem

IVA Studio is the AI control tower to manage the skills IVA uses, the tools it can call, the external systems it connects to through MCP and the LLMs it runs on. IVA is LLM-agnostic; customers can use the models Ivalua provides out of the box or bring their own. With IVA Studio, IT teams, partners and customers can build or tailor what IVA can do and how it connects.

Ivalua says that IVA Studio will be available in the next few weeks.