Tradeshift’s AI Ada aids commerce
Supply chain finance firm Tradeshift has unveiled Ada – an artificial intelligence (AI) layer on its commerce platform.
Ada will learn from user interactions, “improve business processes”, and offer contextual information. It is available to third-party developers and interacts with users platform-wide as a conversational interface.
Christian Lanng, CEO and co-founder of Tradeshift, says Ada offers an “instant response to any requests related to transactions, procurement, spend, payments etc. It connects the dots between data sources, workflows, and patterns” and users don’t have to move between contexts to get what they need.
For example, Lanng explains that Ada can “listen in” to your online conversations and clue in on keywords and unobtrusively suggest an app, such as for order collaboration or supply chain financing when you happen to mention them in a context.
If a person is a Tradeshift Buy user, Ada can, for instance, help compare how much a department has spent quarter over quarter. For reordering goods and services, it can pre-populate a purchase request with the previous order (if that was the original, or show a list if there were more).
Ada can be connected to Slack via an API, which means an assistant can “reach out” to a purchase approver on the user’s behalf.
Lanng doesn’t mention it, but it’s conceivable Ada is a reference to Ada Lovelace (who for some is regarded as the world’s first computer programmer).
