OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool is changing the game for procurement – in more ways than one.
Individuals and corporations are able to complete tasks, save money and have their questions answered in seconds.
But with recent layoffs in the thousands at tech giants Microsoft, Amazon and Google, it’s no wonder many are fearing for the future of their jobs.
Since its launch at the end of 2022, users can’t get enough of ChatGPT as they try to find its strengths and flaws to prove it’s still in its infancy. Or are they just remaining hopeful on behalf of the worriers?
It can be easy getting carried away trying to find a way to assure yourself that ChatGPT isn’t going to replace you and do your job. In fact, here’s what it had to say about
‘20 ways that ChatGPT could be used in procurement’
- Creating and sending RFIs and RFQs
- Responding to vendor enquiries
- Generating purchase orders and contracts
- Identifying and analysing spend data
- Searching for and sourcing new suppliers
- Negotiating prices and terms with suppliers
- Managing supplier performance and compliance
- Creating and managing e-sourcing events
- Generating reports and dashboards on procurement metrics
- Providing real-time support to users throughout the procurement process
- Conducting market research and analysis
- Managing supplier relationships and communications
- Providing training and guidance on procurement best practices
- Automating the invoice processing and payment
- Generating alerts for contract expirations and renewals
- Identifying cost savings opportunities
- Managing and analysing supplier risks
- Automating compliance and regulatory checks
- Providing Spend analysis
- Predictive analytics and forecasting for procurement needs.
And when asked:
‘How can ChatGPT help negotiating prices and terms with suppliers?’
ChatGPT can assist with negotiating prices and terms with suppliers in a few ways:
- By providing market intelligence and industry data to inform negotiation strategies and tactics
- By generating and analysing alternative offers and scenarios to help identify the most favourable terms
- By assisting in the drafting and preparation of negotiation proposals and counterproposals
- By providing real-time support during negotiations, such as answering questions, providing information and suggesting next steps
- By using historical data and machine learning to predict suppliers’ behaviour, and suggest offers and counter-offers.
- By using natural language understanding to analyse supplier’s emails and detect their intent.
- By using natural language generation to generate persuasive and well-structured emails or messages to suppliers.
- By providing real-time translation during negotiations with suppliers who speak a different language.
- Note that the use of ChatGPT in negotiation process should be guided by human experts to ensure the best outcome.
Procurement is just at the beginning of a great evolution for AI and humans working together. You only need to look at its responses to see it still lacks a human edge.
So you’re safe – for now.
But for sure, AI is here to stay and will continue to learn more about itself from the people that use it. Despite the layoffs, AI technology like ChatGPT can provide great benefits for automating tasks and freeing up time to boost productivity amongst workforces. Microsoft clearly sees the advantages in the technology after it was revealed it will be investing ‘billions of dollars in a multiyear agreement’, therefore time will tell for its users to see how it benefits them.
Can AI become our new colleague? One thing’s for sure, we’ll be kept on our toes to see how humans can keep such technologies as an ally.
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