Lily Sawyer is an in-house writer for EME Outlook Magazine, where she is responsible for interviewing corporate executives and crafting original features for the magazine, corporate...
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Ivalua has unveiled IVA Studio, a new AI-powered platform that enables procurement teams to automate and execute Source-to-Pay processes through a single intelligent virtual agent, delivering value from day one.
Enterprise AI platform Ivalua has announced the launch of IVA Studio, a new solution designed to redefine how procurement teams work with artificial intelligence (AI).
Available in the coming weeks, IVA Studio serves as the control centre for Ivalua’s Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA), enabling organisations to execute activities across the entire Source-to-Pay (S2P) process through a single agent that understands business data, follows governance rules, and takes action immediately.
Rather than requiring multiple AI agents across disconnected systems, IVA combines procurement knowledge, workflow automation, and organisational expertise into one unified experience.
A NEW WAY TO WORK
IVA enables procurement professionals to complete complex tasks through simple conversations.
For example, a category manager preparing to re-source an expiring contract can instruct IVA to retrieve the agreement, benchmark it against existing contracts, identify stronger suppliers, create an RFx, and launch the sourcing event. Similarly, Accounts Payable teams can use IVA to validate invoices against purchase orders, pricing information, and contractual obligations contained within supporting documentation.
The solution can also operate autonomously in the background. When supplier risk events occur, IVA can identify affected contracts, analyse open purchase orders, create mitigation plans, and recommend alternative suppliers without requiring manual intervention.
According to Ivalua, IVA can perform any action available to a user because it has access to the full functionality, data, and workflows of the company’s S2P platform.
“At Ivalua, we believe the future of procurement is not AI, it’s people using AI to deliver better and faster results. With IVA, procurement teams can focus on what they do best: building strategies and relationships, internally and externally”
At the heart of the launch is IVA Studio, which Ivalua describes as a complete agentic operating system for procurement.
Built on a skills-based framework similar to those adopted by leading AI laboratories, IVA can automatically assemble the tools, knowledge, and capabilities required for each task. For more sophisticated activities, it can create and coordinate temporary sub-agents while maintaining human oversight throughout the process.
This approach removes the need for procurement teams to build, configure, and manage multiple agents. Instead, IVA leverages the entire Ivalua platform as both its knowledge base and operational toolset, enabling organisations to begin realising value immediately.
“Procurement teams have typically had to spend time building and configuring AI agents before seeing any results. Ivalua’s approach is entirely different: IVA accesses the Ivalua platform as its toolset and source of knowledge, so procurement can start getting value from day one, within a framework of governance that’s enforced by design”
A key differentiator of IVA Studio is its governance model.
Rather than relying on the agent itself to determine access rights, governance is enforced at the platform level. IVA inherits the permissions of the user who activates it and cannot operate beyond those boundaries.
Even when functioning autonomously within workflows, the system remains linked to an accountable user and incorporates human-in-the-loop controls where required. Every action is recorded through a continuous audit trail, ensuring transparency and compliance.
This approach allows organisations to deploy AI confidently while maintaining clear oversight of decision-making and execution.
EXPERTISE THAT GROWS OVER TIME
Ivalua has also focused on enabling organisations to capture and scale procurement expertise.
The platform can learn and codify sourcing strategies, negotiation approaches, compliance requirements, and other best practices as reusable skills. These capabilities become part of the organisation’s collective knowledge, allowing teams to benefit from accumulated expertise regardless of individual experience levels.
IVA also maintains memory of previous interactions and continuously improves over time, helping organisations expand automation and efficiency as trust in the technology grows.
FITTING INTO THE WIDER AI ECOSYSTEM
Designed to be model-agnostic, IVA Studio allows customers to use AI models provided by Ivalua or integrate their own preferred large language models.
The platform also supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, enabling connections to external systems and tools. Through IVA Studio, customers, implementation partners, and IT teams can manage skills, integrations, permissions, and model configurations from a single environment.
As organisations continue to explore AI-driven procurement, Ivalua believes IVA Studio represents a significant step towards a future in which intelligent agents are embedded throughout sourcing, supplier management, and spend management processes.
This article was produced by the editorial team at EME Outlook and published as part of the Outlook Publishing global network of B2B industry magazines.
Outlook Publishing delivers industry insights, company stories, and sector coverage across manufacturing, mining, construction, healthcare, supply chains, food production, and sustainability.
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Lily Sawyer is an in-house writer for EME Outlook Magazine, where she is responsible for interviewing corporate executives and crafting original features for the magazine, corporate brochures, and the digital platform.
