With artificial intelligence at its core, Keelvar is transforming procurement at scale by providing intelligent reasoning to make faster, more impactful decisions and achieve better outcomes with less effort. Having recently launched Kai, its new orchestrator tool, the company finds itself on the precipice of defining a new era for procurement.
KAI – A NEW AGE OF AGENTIC AI
The use of strategic sourcing optimisation and automation software for enterprise procurement has become increasingly popular in today’s fast-evolving business landscape.
With many companies utilising artificial intelligence (AI) to assist clients, the ability to automate buying processes, manage complex sourcing events, and optimise supply chains has never been easier.
One such business is Keelvar, the world’s fastest-growing strategic sourcing platform, which provides large enterprises with advanced optimisation-based sourcing software.
Specifically offering intelligent sourcing automation – a new category of software that uses AI-enabled bots to fully automate processes – Keelvar manages upwards of USD$100 billion in spending annually for major customers such as Caterpillar, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, Coca-Cola, Carlsberg Group, and more.
The company has recently unveiled Kai, its affectionately named new AI orchestrator tool, which has been skilfully developed from over a decade of sourcing expertise.
Built directly into the Keelvar platform, Kai acts as the central intelligence of the company’s multi-agent system, designed to transform natural language requests into completed sourcing actions.
It coordinates specialised AI agents to execute end-to-end sourcing workflows, thereby delivering faster execution, measurable savings, and full control.
As the adoption of AI-enabled sourcing optimisation continues to accelerate across industries, Keelvar is leading the charge with Kai.
SETTING ITSELF APART
Kai differentiates itself from traditional AI-enhanced tools due to its ability to reason and act autonomously – as opposed to merely advising – drawing on advanced internal reasoning to coordinate various software for specific tasks.
It utilises natural language intake and orchestration to intelligently route requests to the appropriate sourcing paths within the Keelvar platform.
Kai also automatically generates structured bid sheets and launches the sourcing event from a single prompt, reducing the manual work required, whilst being able to recommend optimal sourcing strategies in real time based on data analysis.
Kai additionally manages supplier bidding and feedback loops autonomously, optimising outcomes whilst allowing human oversight via conditional approvals, and the best supplier can automatically be selected by the software based on various criteria such as price.
This has dramatically reduced cycle times for businesses, with some events completing in under 15 minutes, allowing companies to be more agile and responsive to market changes.
Kai has also provided measurable cost savings and long-term value by ensuring all purchases go through a competitive bidding process using advanced optimisation algorithms, as well as reducing the manual work required for many processes.
It is also important to note how inbuilt custom workflows enable users to maintain full control and transparency thanks to Kai’s governance and compliance settings.
PROCUREMENT PROWESS
Heralding a new age of agentic AI, Allan Holland, CEO at Keelvar, reflects on how the company is uniquely positioned to lead this revolution with the advent of Kai.
He notes how a future characterised by machine-to-machine negotiations could fundamentally alter the dynamics of procurement, introducing an elevated level of precision and speed.
Holland also points out how, despite Kai’s ability to provide granular detail and exchange rich data regarding economies of scale and scope, the software remains under the discerning oversight of human controllers.
He urges us to embrace technology such as Kai to enable a step change in economic efficiency and overall welfare for both suppliers and buyers, with agentic AI holding the solution to better deals, more robust supply chains, and a truly optimised global marketplace.
As Keelvar continues to build the future of procurement one intelligent agent at a time, Kai is making a transformative impact on the sector – revolutionising sourcing, optimising workflows, and improving compliance.
