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Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Coupa Acquires Cirtuo, Leader in AI-Powered Category Management
Cirtuo's technology will unlock the full potential of AI-powered category management and sourcing, accelerating Coupa's autonomous spend management vision and roadmap FOSTER CITY, Calif., May 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Coupa, the leader in AI-native total spend management, today announced it has acquired Croatia-based Cirtuo, an industry leader in AI-powered category management. This strategic investment accelerates Coupa's autonomous spend management vision and underscores Coupa's commitment to developing AI-powered solutions that improve productivity, agility, and resilience while delivering margin impact. Category managers are under mounting pressure to align procurement strategies and initiatives with enterprise priorities such as sustainability, risk mitigation, and innovation. Recognizing the widening gap between strategic planning and tactical buying, organizations are turning to AI-enabled solutions to bridge productivity and efficiency gaps. By integrating Cirtuo's AI-enabled category management capabilities with Coupa's leading Total Spend Management platform, Coupa is set to deliver a comprehensive solution that seamlessly translates robust, data-driven strategies into sourcing pipelines, supplier actions, and savings realization. This includes supporting the full supplier strategy lifecycle, from strategy planning, to execution, to monitoring, all within a unified system. These new capabilities will help procurement stakeholders not only drive cost reduction and cost avoidance, but extend to deliver a deeper understanding of business needs. "Transforming the end-to-end procurement process requires reimagining technology's role. We're investing heavily in GenAI to automate routine tasks, enhance strategic decision-making, and bring autonomous procurement to market," said Salvatore Lombardo, Coupa Chief Product and Technology Officer. "With the acquisition of Cirtuo, we strengthen our AI-native solutions and fill a critical gap in Coupa's Strategic Sourcing Suite. This allows us to deliver a comprehensive category management solution where customers can create margin impact, especially in direct spend categories, by integrating analysis, strategy, and execution in one place." "Cirtuo empowers procurement teams to build AI-guided, insight-driven strategies that align with business priorities and flow directly into tactical activities resulting in seamless, closed-loop procurement processes," said Drasko Jelavic, Cirtuo CEO. "We're excited to join Coupa as businesses embrace digital transformation in the AI era." Making Category Strategies Actionable Cirtuo's market leading category management solution continues to be recognized for its pioneering technology by procurement practitioners, technology experts, and customers. Key solutions include: Guided Category Strategy: Guides users with an interview-style approach to craft holistic category strategies without robust training enabling in-depth spend analysis and actionable insights for data-driven category management. Guided Supplier Strategy: Leverage supplier relationships by connecting the dots between category and supplier strategies. Develop strategies that align seamlessly with business requirements and extend the focus on relationship metrics. Initiative Management & Value Tracking: Manage your strategic savings, supplier, and risk mitigation initiatives end-to-end with clearly defined tasks, owners, milestones, and timelines to easily demonstrate impact on savings and value tracking. As a leader in AI-powered category management, Cirtuo has helped some of the world's biggest and best global brands create real business impact, including Ball Corporation, Molson Coors, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Utz Brands, Walmart, and more. Customers are saying: "Cirtuo greatly enhances the category strategies that we're developing. Cirtuo follows best practices and helps us to be more strategic and get us out of the tactical execution that we are stuck in. It's easy to use. It's a no-brainer." - Michael DeWitt, VP of Indirect Spend Management & Center of Excellence, Walmart "The digitization of category management is a required and necessary journey. Through Cirtuo Guided Strategy Creation, integrated market intelligence and AI, Cirtuo makes it faster and easier." - Stephane Morel, Procurement Director, ex-Novartis "By providing proof-of-impact to BT and capturing the pay-for-performance element of BT Sourced's total compensation, Cirtuo enables our procurement team to develop high-quality category strategies that generate savings and present new opportunities." - Cyril Pourrat, Chief Procurement Officer, BT Sourced Attendees at Coupa's flagship annual event, Inspire, will have a chance to learn more about the power of combining Coupa and Cirtuo from Cirtuo's CEO Drasko Jelavic at a dedicated breakout session and in the Expo Hall. Learn more about and Learn more about how you can master spend and cost management without sacrificing growth. Kaizen Equity Partners served as financial advisor to Cirtuo. Kirkland & Ellis and Wolf Theiss served as legal counsel to Coupa. About CoupaCoupa is the leader in AI-native total spend management. Using its trusted, community-generated, $8 trillion dataset, Coupa brings autonomous AI agents, a network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers, and leading apps together on one unified platform to seamlessly automate the buying process and connect to customers in a whole new way. With Coupa, you'll make margins multiply™. Learn more at and follow us on LinkedIn and X (Twitter). About CirtuoCirtuo is the pioneer in digital category management and strategy creation. Based on the original consulting blueprint for category management and refined in countless client workshops, Cirtuo distills the insights from hundreds of category strategies across global and local procurement organizations and spend categories into one digital consultant: Cirtuo Guided Strategy Creation™ Pro. Cirtuo supports over 5,000 category managers of leading national and multinational companies like Siemens Energy, Boeing, Walmart, Novartis, Molson Coors, or British Telecom across industries and 40+ countries in creating business-centric and actionable category and supplier strategies that deliver unparalleled impact and value. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Coupa Software Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Time of India
06-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
AI set to disrupt pricing models for business communication
Companies that provide call-centre and business messaging services are expecting a shift in the way they charge customers to a more outcome-based and bundled pricing structure from the traditional pay-per-message or pay-per-seat models, as artificial intelligence takes over voice and text conversations and reduces manpower costs, executives said. #Pahalgam Terrorist Attack India orders nationwide defence drills as Indo-Pak tensions rise From blackouts to bunkers: Inside India's civil defence mock drills across 244 districts on May 7 A woman spy who helped India defeat Pakistan in 1971 'Call centres are still charging there is a huge risk that that will be disrupted as AI reduces that cost significantly,' said Ivan Ostojic, chief business officer at Croatia-based Infobip , which offers cloud-based communications tools for marketing, sales and support. 'We expect to see a telco-type model where I have some predicted consumption per user and then I can create a bundle for you — from SaaS or AI, down to the channel. It'll be like interaction, consumption conversation. And then there'll be bundles that secure you from price hikes or drops,' he said. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 5 cheap and easy DIY tricks with empty plastic bottles. Story to Hear Undo Communication-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) companies like Infobip are now experimenting with unlocking use cases where the cost of implementation justifies the benefit incurred. Going forward, multi-channel conversations across SMS, voice, WhatsApp, RCS and in-app notifications could well be priced in bundles as AI agents automate workflows, industry executives said. 'Our pricing models vary depending on several factors, including the complexity of the use case, the extent of AI integration and backend systems involved,' said Deepak Goyal, chief business officer at Tanla Platforms , a Hyderabad-based company providing tools to help businesses communicate with their customers. Live Events Although AI use cases are costlier than structured, rule-based conversational offerings, customers are willing to pay a premium as value created outweighs the incremental cost, he said. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories For instance, Tanla ran a campaign for a retail brand where users were prompted to upload images of broken appliances via WhatsApp in exchange for an exclusive coupon. Although multimodal AI image recognition is expensive to deploy, this campaign achieved redemption rates as high as 30 times, Goyal said. 'GenAI based use cases are at an early stage of their journey and are yet to find a right pricing fit,' said Gautam Badalia, CEO of Route Mobile , another CPaaS company. 'There is a significant cost involved in GenAI interactions based on the various engines available today.' As AI agents unlock new use-uses in customer services, the pricing models will also evolve to be more outcome based, he said. 'Currently, pay-per-message is the most prominent pricing model with AI agents.' Route Mobile enabled an insurance company to use an AI agent which converses with users on WhatsApp to understand their profile and needs and suggests the most relevant policy. 'This solution is targeted to overcome any human errors in policy suggestions and avoid potential mis-selling,' Badalia said.
