Scared of AI? Try Auto-Classify!

Last week we noted that if you were scared of AI (and rightfully so, as it tends to over-promise and under-deliver), you should start with Auto-Buy — specifically, auto-buy for certain tail-spend products and services where the platform can at least get you market average pricing on a product or service you’re likely overpaying by 15% or more on. The platform might not be able to match the best expert, but it can far surpass an average buyer, and paying market average is better than overpaying by 15%.

In this post we said that your spend generally breaks down into strategically sourced, bought from the GPO, catalog buy, and the rest falls into the tail. And the way to save significant money quickly and easy is to get the tail out of control … a large tail spend can be costing you 6% against the bottom line. That’s huge. And there’s only one way to get this under control. Auto-buy. And there’s only one way to do better — get the spend out of the tail into the other categories.

This is easier said then done. Tail spend might only be 20% of the spend by dollar, but it’s 80% to 95%+ of spend by volume — trying to classify each and every purchase to a strategically source, GPO, or catalog category it could fall into is a monumental task, and that’s why the tail spend stays high,

But it’s not a monumental task for AI. Remember, we can’t do millions of calculations a second – computers can. And when enough of these calculations are done, and correlated, computers can make assignments that, on average, greatly exceed the accuracy of an average buyer in significantly less time. Plus, the rare-misclassification will be found quickly by a human buyer and re-assigned to the right category — either the product has an equivalent in the GPO, or it doesn’t. Either it has an equivalent in the catalog, or it doesn’t. Or it fits the way the strategic buyers buy, or not. But in the first two cases in particular, the computer will be not only be able to identify the best matches with high accuracy, but even provide its reasoning.

So use the AI for what it’s good at — bulk computation and analysis. And be confident that while it will greatly reduce your tactical workload and make you more efficient, it won’t replace you — in fact, it will make you irreplaceable as you will be freed up to spend more time on the strategic, value generating work.