NL
ChatGPT:
Booster for Procurement

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot that uses an artificial intelligence (AI) model, developed by OpenAI. It is trained on huge amounts of text data from the internet and books. It is capable of providing answers to questions and commands related to a number of rich topics and tasks, such as displaying facts, conversations and translations.

ChatGPT is specifically designed to simulate human communication and is used in many applications, including marketing, website development, media, customer service, entertainment, etc. In short, you can ask any question in English or Dutch and you will receive an answer in English or Dutch as if a human has given the answer.

Popularity of ChatGPT

ChatGPT is now rapidly becoming popular and we are quickly learning what can and cannot be done with it. For example, students can write a thesis in no time on almost any subject. Software programmers can generate the explanation of the software code and then spend their valuable time on the actual programming.

The possibilities are phenominal, the quality of the output is, for the most part, amazingly good. Because it is still in an experimental phase, the answers are not based on current data. For example, the war in the Ukraine is not yet known because the model has been trained on data up to and including 2021. It is expected that this problem will be improved in 2023 with the arrival of GPT-4, the machine behind ChatGPT.

ChatGPT for Procurement?

ChatGPT can generally be regarded as your personal virtual purchasing assistant. As a buyer, category or purchasing manager, you can ask ChatGPT any question that comes to your mind. You can be triggered by the answer, get new insights, knowledge or ideas and then ask further questions. This then takes place ad-hoc when you need it.

More structured analysis or insights based on larger amounts of data can be realized via a connection with the algorithm. The role of Zuiver Analytics comes into the picture here. We are able to link our data analysis to the machine behind ChatGPT and have this AI machine execute commands on large(r) data sets.

Specific Options

The areas in which we work with ChatGPT are:

  • Categorizing suppliers and products for the SpendAnalysis;
  • Supplementing product data with the primary and secondary raw materials for the price fluctuation explorer. This allows us to compare the raw material price index with the price index of the specific supplier for all purchased products with that specific raw material;
  • Classifying the product categories in the Kraljic Matrix;
  • Analyzing supplier risks;
  • Analyzing the contract texts (shortcomings, errors, compliance with agreements, etc.);
  • Adding environmental characteristics of products for a sustainability analysis.

The first results are extremely positive. The results are certainly not 100% correct yet, but they are already very usable in practice. Fine-tuning is necessary to optimize the results.

If you would like to know more about what ChatGPT can also do for your purchasing or if you would like to perform a concrete test, please contact us.

Get in touch to receive more information on how we can bring your data to actionable insights