Procurement intake processes are often misunderstood by other areas of the business, and having to constantly guide distributed buyers through every step, procedure, or process can be an overwhelmingly unrealistic task for procurement, especially at scale.
In this episode of AOP Introducing, Philip Ideson speaks with Sagi Eliyahu, co-founder and CEO of Tonkean, about their transformative new solution: Tonkean Enterprise Copilot, an AI-powered employee assistant tool that helps internal teams like procurement, legal, and IT anticipate employees’ needs, guide them through manual requests, unify processes that span different systems and departments, and automate manual steps.
The Tonkean team developed Enterprise Copilot to bridge the gap between how business processes actually work and how software has traditionally approached these processes… until now, that is. The new product uses AI and advanced orchestration to build upon their current procurement platform. “The Enterprise Copilot and all of the leverage around AI is actually a next iteration of how we bring a lot of those fundamentals from our platform in a new and more modern way for end users,” said Sagi.
As a former software engineer, Sagi noticed a fundamental disconnect between how enterprise software was designed and how business processes actually function. “From the origins of Tonkean, I realized that there’s a gap between how things actually work and where we spend our effort as people that build products,” Sagi said. “Business processes are actually not about data, they’re about people, but everything about software and enterprise, 100% at that time, but still mostly today is about data.”
That realization led to the creation of Tonkean nearly 10 years ago, and since then the company has evolved to address the specific needs of functional areas like procurement, which rely heavily on collaboration and communication with other parts of the business. Copilot, Tonkean’s most recent innovation, builds upon Tonkean’s existing AI Front Door platform by giving teams access to a more comprehensive approach to process automation and user experience throughout the entire process. While their Front Door platform has already proven valuable in deflecting requests and bringing procurement into the beginning stages of business need, Enterprise Copilot extends AI capabilities throughout the entire workflow, solving pain points and addressing challenges for infrequent users who often struggle to understand procurement terminology, processes, and policies.
Enterprise Copilot goes beyond simply answering questions and also proactively helps users by auto-filling information based on data from across the business and current company policies. Here, the AI pulls relevant information from disparate systems or tools across the entire organization to pre-populate fields, suggest personalized next steps, and provide an enhanced user experience.
“Copilot is not a chatbot you put on top of the platform – it actually does actions on your behalf behind the scenes. So you start from the Front Door, but as you go through and as things happen behind the scenes to get approvals from stakeholders or reviews from stakeholders, the AI copilot is there along the way creating suggestions and insights and auto-creating and auto-completing tasks for different users in the flow,” he said.
This type of comprehensive approach, said Sagi, creates a more personalized, efficient, and enjoyable user experience for everyone in the business, but most especially those users who are less experienced with intake procedures. It minimizes the effort required from end-users, and allows them to delegate much of the processes to the AI copilot.
As Sagi put it, “”The main point of it is I, as an end user, want to have a better experience, a more personal experience. But in reality, I don’t actually want any experience. I just want it to be done. I want to delegate that. And this is what the co-pilot does. Co-pilot for employees is for everything that they’re not power users at, if you will.”
And the impact that this kind of process optimization can have, not just on procurement but the business as a whole, is significant. “Within a few weeks of launching it you see the time requirement cut in half, but the spend under management and the engagement grow exponentially after that,” said Sagi.
Flexible, adaptive, and customizable, Enterprise Copilot is often initially deployed for indirect spend, but its capabilities extend across the entire landscape of third-party spend and can also easily connect to existing databases or document repositories, serving up whatever data points are needed in a matter of seconds.
“The reality is, procurement people are really, really, really strong in understanding and anticipating what the company needs and how to better manage the resources they have in order to get a better outcome,” said Sagi. “They’re not necessarily product people who understand user experience and user adoption. Tonkean allows you to have better control and a better experience by delegating some of those decisions and delegating some of that back and forth to AI that is trained for those specific concepts and trained to create better results.”
