The Future of Autonomous Spend Orchestrated with Coupa

Hi, everyone. This is Colleen Coll from Techstrong TV. We are here at Coupa Inspire in the lovely Las Vegas, and we are scheduling two full days of conversations with people shaping the future of how companies spend, buy, and operate.

And to kick us off, we have Leigh Turner, CEO of Coupa. Leigh, thank you for joining us. It's my huge pleasure.

Thank you for having me. So Leigh is fresh from the keynote- I am ... it just happened.

So Leigh, how are you feeling about that? I'm feeling great. You know what?

I was telling you, we have just absolutely slammed room. It was standing room only. We have the greatest attendance at Inspire that we've ever had.

We have a developer conference happening simultaneously. Oh, yeah, I did hear about the DevCon. Yep.

This is your first, right? It's our first. Yeah.

And we had registration room for 250 people yesterday. 402 people showed up. Oh, nice.

So we had to create more space. Our executives exchange is full, and we attribute all of this to just the sheer demand of how do we make AI work? AI native, you're calling that, your company has transformed to that.

I know last year I was reading that it was more AI integration, and I believe you brought up Navi, the agent, the assistant. We did. So that's awesome, and I love it.

Whoever designed Navi is just fantastic. But what are you most excited about for Coupa and the customers? Yeah, so Coupa, let's just begin, is a two-sided network.

Buyers and suppliers come together. They share their transactional level data with one another. We analyze it, and we make recommendations to both sides.

That's why both sides save money- Yeah ... and generate revenue. That's what we've done forever.

What I'm most excited about at this conference, we announced Coupa Compose, which is our agents, our agent-building tool- Mm-hmm ... our orchestration, and all of that sits together on top of the Coupa workflow, fully integrated and leveraging our customers' data to be able to make the dreams of AI real. So that's how far we've come over the course of a year.

To your point, last year, we were talking about an agent in a workflow. Today, we have 20 live agents all doing a variety of different skills, and at the end of the year, we'll have 65. Oh, 65 is a big number.

When you were in the keynote, you made several big announcements that- We did ... how'd that go? I was reading through the whole list of major announcements.

Do you want to talk more about that? Yeah. We announced Coupa Compose, which as I said- Mm ...

is effectively an agent-building platform- Mm-hmm ... an orchestration platform. We also announced that we are going to deploy, self-funded by the way- Mm ...

our own forward-deployed engineers into our customers. Why? Because AI transformation requires some support.

Everybody's learning how to do their jobs differently. Mm-hmm. Everybody's trying to figure out what it means to be put to higher order use.

And so we're going to help our customers move through this transformation. And we talked about our pricing model changes. So we traditionally price, just as all companies did, based on users.

We are shifting and have announced today that we're going to index to one thing, and that's the amount of spend that our buyers and suppliers move through our platform. That's it. So the more spend they move through our platform, the more value they will get from us- Mm-hmm ...

and we will index our pricing to that. Just that simple. Because what we don't want to do is be a limitation to AI adoption.

So we announced that today. And we announced something very exciting- Mm ... which was the acquisition of Rossum.

Yes. So I'm happy to talk about that- Yeah ... if you'd like me to.

Yeah, please do. I know that it just happened this morning. It did.

, and here's why we did it. Rossum is the leader in intelligent document processing. So in effect, they can ingest- Mm-hmm ...

and understand documents at a really high rate, and they can immediately, through straight-through processing, process that document through to invoicing touchlessly. You can imagine the way that they do it, actually, is having built their own data model- Mm-hmm ... learning from every single document and every single transaction to be able to inform the way to process a document touchlessly.

So we intend to use that technology across our entire platform in order to be able to make an ingentric reality real. Well, how's it different when you say touchlessly? Compared to when it was touchable.

Yeah. How does that work with Rossum? Invoices used to be manually loaded- Yes ...

manually assessed, manually deciphered as to- Yes ... whether or not to service them- Mm-hmm ... and then manually serviced.

Today, 100% of that happens touchlessly. So how do you sell it to your customers when you talk about Coupa being an AI-native company and making it a part, like this is something positive, not negative? Yeah.

How do your people sell that to your customers? First, let me just begin with a declaration. This is the second industrial revolution.

Mm-hmm. That's what's happening. Yes.

And all of our jobs will change as a result, and change is scary. Yes, it is. However, if we look back, people used to plow fields by hand.

Mm-hmm. And it was difficult to be able to get crops out of the ground and service to people. Now, today, we go into a grocery store, we have what we want, and humanity can thrive.

Mm-hmm. The same thing is going to be true here. Mm.

Our jobs will change. And it will allow people to do uniquely human work, like interacting with one another, collaborating, thinking about things that don't yet exist- Mm-hmm ... trying to sell those ideas to other people to get them bought in, moving people through change.

We are going to see a total reinvention in the way that work gets done, and I think that as long as you view it as something you can take part in- Mm-hmm ... it's not so scary. And so the greatest encouragement I have for anybody is dive in.

Yes. And it sounds to me, you being an AI native company, that you guys are walking the walk internally. So with that, if you have something else before we wrap up, do you want to talk more about that?

How are you walking the walk? Yeah, of course. Let me just say, AI native means to us- Mm-hmm ...

20 years ago, our customers agreed that they would share every single transaction that passed through our network. That's both buyers and suppliers. Yes.

Okay? That's the fundamental AI nativity of Coupa. Mm-hmm.

And for many of those 20 years, we couldn't imagine how we would capture that data and surface it to both sides to give them real lift, because we didn't have all the compute power and agent leverage that we do today. But now we do. Yeah.

And so when I say AI native, that's what I mean. I mean best agents come from the best data. We've had it for 20 years.

Our customers have agreed for us to use it. Mm-hmm. They view it as their data, shareable across this community, and that's something that we've been endeavoring to do now for the last 20 years, and now we're really meaningfully accelerating.

You can see the skills starting to come out- Mm-hmm ... in our agent portfolio. Oh.

It's wonderful. I love it. Leigh, thank you for coming, and thank you for tuning in.

We'll have more to come at Coupa Inspire.