Google Teams With Unifiedpost On Data Procurement

Google has teamed with Unifiedpost on a collaboration that could allow Google’s Procurement DocAI Solution applied on a much wider scale to over 400,000 businesses in Europe, a report from ZDNet says.

Unifiedpost is a FinTech with a presence in 15 countries, handling procurement documents for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and over 250 enterprise players.

Artificial intelligence (AI) could help to streamline the formerly time-consuming process of procurement, ZDNet reports.

Procurement DocAI, announced in September, will help with using AI to capture valuable information from documents and other forms of unstructured data. Unifiedpost is working with Google on refining the solution, so it can aid in capturing data from invoices, eInvoices, Know Your Customer (KYC) records and payment services including things like IBAN notices and PSD2 payments, the report says.

Nelson Gonzalez, product manager at Google Cloud, said the area the partnership intends to tackle is a busy one.

“Large enterprise procurement and distribution networks as well as SMEs generate millions of invoices, receipts, and other related documents a year,” he said, according to ZDNet. “These processes generate significant overhead for every procured item. With competitive pressures only increasing, businesses are forced to find new ways to automate one of their highest volume business processes.”

Both companies said the implementation of Procurement DocAI would reduce procure-to-pay processing costs by 60 percent and maybe boost data accuracy by 250 percent for document extraction with Unifiedpost.

Procurement analytics have more expectations laid upon them than even a few years ago, PYMNTS reports. Johan-Peter Teppala, CEO of Sievo, told PYMNTS that procurement analyses have to go beyond spend and providing insights only into past trends.

Instead, he said there needed to be more work to measure savings, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic changed peoples’ habits. And he said companies need to look deeper in general, analyzing things like how commodity price volatility affected the spending in the past year.