The rise of AI powered technology in the procurement tech space has been profound. Where practical and smart applications of its power have been deployed, the benefits across a variety of fronts have given rise to significant leaps in capability.
This short blog will explore these impacts within the specific area of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology empowered more recently by LLM’s (Large Language Models).
Let’s start by travelling back a couple of years. A large organisation has a burning requirement for spend based visibility across their global procurement operations. They have only header level data in their ERP and invoices landing from 40 countries in over 5 different languages. Had they approached the market looking for a Spend Analytics solution at this time regrettably, it’s highly unlikely a solution would’ve been viable and certainly not at the time here at Anvil.
Wind forward just two years to the current date and the answer is very different, all thanks to the application of this AI powered technology. So, how does it all work? How can a solution now pick up on data from potentially 100,000’s of annual invoices in different languages and piece together a world-class Spend Analytics suite? We’ll show you how…
Firstly, the invoice data needs to be harvested. This is where the OCR part comes in. This technology interestingly isn’t so new and has been on the scene for some time. Through the use of different models, carefully coded, the technology can pick up on the key invoice contents to play back into the model. However, alone this is not enough. This approach wouldn’t cater for additional languages and complexity in terms of written data. Here, with the introduction of LLM’s the solution truly works. Anvil has picked up on data across a variety of language sets including German, Mandarin and Hungarian.
The data is then paired with the header level information delivered from ERP to form the basis of the solution. From there, a more standard approach can take place with the cleansing and categorisation of data prior to a full state of readiness for feeding into the Spend Analytics solution.
So, in summary, should an organisation (as so many do) come through the door tomorrow with such a complex requirement, the answer is now yes, a spend solution is available all with thanks to the rise of targeted and practical uses of AI tech. Whilst the procurement space is awash with unimpressive buzz words and empty promises circling this space currently it’s always important to highlight where real advances are being made and here’s just one.
To learn more about AI technology and how’s its being fed into procurement technology solutions around the world, reach out to us directly at Anvil and we’d love to have a chat.
