Buying Assistant

Overview: Deploy agents today. Unlock even more tomorrow.

The AI agents you stand up in SAP Ariba will lay the foundation for the future of procurement and they’ll hit even harder in next-gen SAP Ariba. That's because the SAP Business AI platform and Business Data Cloud significantly sharpen agentic decision-making, amplifying the value of everything you've already launched.

The Buying Assistant helps procurement teams use AI to identify spend leakage, recommend optimal suppliers and generate short names for catalogue items. By automating analysis and delivering actionable recommendations, it optimises spend, reduces manual effort and streamlines catalogue quality management, enrichment and normalisation—enabling faster, more consistent purchasing decisions and a better experience for buyers.

Tasks this assistant can help with:

• Enriching and normalising catalogue content
• Detecting purchase orders without contract assignment and providing recommendations to optimise spend
• Recommending and assigning optimal suppliers to purchase requisitions based on historical purchase data, supplier performance metrics, pricing trends and contract details

Example use cases for this assistant:

• Catalogue data quality management and normalisation
• Acceleration of source-of-supply assignment
• Elimination of spend leakage and strengthening contract coverage
• Spend optimisation

Benefits

Improved catalogue management
Automate enrichment and validation of catalogue data at upload, saving time and enhancing catalogue quality without manual effort from catalogue managers.

Consistent stocking of critical materials
Use self-directing AI that autonomously monitors potential supply gaps and assigns new sources of supply for standardised, frequently purchased materials.

Faster, more consistent sourcing decisions
Choose the right supplier quickly in day-to-day purchasing through automatic assessment of relevant criteria and clear, explainable recommendations.

Agents used by this assistant

Use the Buying Assistant to orchestrate specialised AI agents, including Joule Agents that apply SAP’s process expertise or customised agents you create.

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