Ivalua has moved to sharpen its artificial intelligence offer for procurement with the launch of IVA Studio and IVA, a single agent designed to operate across its spend management platform.
The company is taking a different route from vendors building multiple specialist agents for separate functions. Instead, it is pitching one conversational interface that can work across sourcing, supplier management, contracts, procurement and accounts payable, while drawing on the broader ...
Continue Reading This Article
Enjoy this article as well as all of our content, including reports, news, tips and more.
By registering or signing into your SRM Today account, you agree to SRM Today's Terms of Use and consent to the processing of your personal information as described in our Privacy Policy.
source-to-pay environment behind the scenes.
The system is intended to let users ask for information, trigger tasks and monitor progress in natural language. In practical terms, Ivalua says a category manager could use it to locate an expiring contract, compare it with others, identify suppliers and launch a request for quotation from one exchange. In accounts payable, it is meant to match invoices against purchase orders, pricing and contract terms.
According to Ivalua, IVA Studio acts as the control layer for the agent, governing skills, permissions, integrations and language models. The company says that structure is meant to give customers more oversight at a time when procurement and finance teams are increasingly wary of artificial intelligence tools that can act as well as suggest.
Governance is central to the pitch. Ivalua says IVA inherits the permissions of the person using it and cannot exceed those limits. When it operates inside a workflow, it remains tied to an accountable user and can escalate for human review. Every action is logged, creating an audit trail.
The company is also arguing that a single-agent model may be easier to manage than a fleet of separate bots. Ivalua says a fragmented approach can add complexity for procurement teams, whereas its system presents one interface while creating temporary sub-agents in the background when needed.
That model is intended to reduce the amount of integration and configuration work before organisations can use the software in live processes. Ivalua says the platform itself provides both the knowledge base and the toolset for the agent, rather than requiring customers to assemble a separate AI environment.
Franck Lheureux, chief executive of Ivalua, framed the launch as a way to put people, rather than machines, at the centre of procurement. David Khuat-Duy, founder and chief AI officer, said the company sees governance and faster deployment as key differentiators, arguing that customers should be able to start seeing value from day one.
IVA Studio is currently in beta, with wider availability planned for the summer.
Source: Noah Wire Services
