SAP NOW AI Tour, London: Scott Bowler, Icertis

The SAP NOW AI Tour was degisned to showcase real-world uses of business AI in finance and spend management.

At the London stop, a full programme combined customer spotlights, solution demonstrations and expert presentations, giving attendees ample opportunities to engage directly with SAP specialists and partners.

Procurement Magazine caught up with Scott Bowler, VP Sales, New Business - North EMEA at Icertis, who discussed AI implementation success stories.

Tell us a bit about you and your role

I'm Scott Bowler, VP of New Business Sales at Icertis across Northern EMEA. My team essentially covers everywhere outside central Europe and we work heavily with SAP across those regions.

For anyone less familiar with Icertis, can you give us an overview of the company?

We're the market-leading contract lifecycle management vendor – we term it contract intelligence. We essentially founded the technology space 16 years ago out of a piece of work with Microsoft. Microsoft was customer number one for us and we've grown from there to be the largest player in the market, with a real focus on enterprise customers.

We really help customers with global scale drive value from their contracts across the business.

To what extent is AI playing into what you do at Icertis?

AI is fundamentally critical for us – we're an AI-first business. Our deliverable to our customers as a starting point is helping them operationalise their data out of contracts. Everyone has a corpus of contracts – tonnes of PDF documents that traditionally people have manually read to extract information from.

Can you give us some success stories of AI implementation?

A large telecommunications company in the UK recently brought two businesses together and, as part of that consolidation, the target was to drive synergies. Leveraging our technology and the AI within it, they were able to find US$35m of contract value across suppliers that they could immediately strip out of the business – a significant saving against the synergies they were looking for from that acquisition

If I look at our German business, we have a large German automotive client managing something like half a million suppliers. Across that volume, we’ve been able to reduce their contract cycle times by 80%, essentially helping them not only write contracts faster, but drive cashflow more effectively.

Why are events like SAP Now AI London so important?

For us, our technology is enterprise-wide. If we look at procurement specifically, typically procurement technologies go very surface level on extracting data from contracts and giving people understanding.

Events like this help us get much closer to those users of those procurement platforms and really show them the depth of capability that our platform and the AI that's inherent in it can deliver for them – helping them negotiate terms faster, drive cost savings out of their existing contracts and reduce the risk they have in their contractual positions.