UK supermarket giant Tesco has made history in the European retail sector by becoming the first company to adopt autonomous sourcing through a partnership with Globality, Procurement Mag reports.
This collaboration enables Tesco, a retail giant with £57.7bn ($73bn) in group sales, to leverage Globality’s Glo technology as a virtual team member.
By using a natural language interface, the technology provides intelligent suggestions and insights to Tesco’s procurement teams, enhancing productivity.
“Our business stakeholders will be able to source their needs autonomously in a consumer-like experience, and yet procurement is able to proactively influence spend to achieve all of our sourcing goals,” said Charles Letizia, Chief Procurement Officer, Tesco told the publication.
Mr Letizia says the supermarket chain has entered “a new world in procurement” and the technology can build out market briefs to recommend suppliers based on unbiased evidence and past performance. Suppliers can then be contracted based on automated cost analysis.
Globality’s Glo bot can streamline processes such as replacing RFPs, and identifying suitable and diverse suppliers. The company says its AI technology and can handle an average company’s spending of $4 billion per customer. Telco company BT manages over £3bn worth of annual spend using the technology using Glo.
Read more on the sourcing partnership between Globability and Tesco.
