aPriori Technologies announced the launch of aiSource™, an AI-powered sourcing and negotiation solution that gives procurement and commodity management teams the same depth of manufacturing cost intelligence that suppliers bring to every negotiation. aiSource is currently in beta with select global manufacturing customers and is expected to be generally available later this year.

In a typical commodity negotiation, the supplier knows exactly what their own parts cost to make. The buyer's team often does not know what the suppliers’ parts should cost. That gap has measurable consequences: aPriori's baseline research across beta participants found that 77% of buyers miss their own savings targets every year. aiSource is built to close that gap.

Built on aPriori's should-cost models, manufacturability analysis, manufacturing process data, and carbon data, aiSource answers a buyer's questions in plain language and grounds every answer in the customer's own product, supplier, and process data without requiring manufacturing expertise or specialist support.

A buyer preparing to renegotiate a contract opens aiSource the morning of the call. The system provides a plain-language overview of the key cost drivers affecting the part’s should-cost, outlines the most viable paths to closing the gap between the quoted price and should-cost, and recommends how to open the negotiation and respond to potential supplier pushback. Going into the call, the buyer knows not just what to ask for but what the supplier is likely to say next and how to respond. During the call, the supplier's feedback is entered into aiSource, which updates the guidance in real time and recommends the buyer's next move. Preparation that used to take three weeks closes in days.

"Buyers have always been at a disadvantage in supplier negotiations because the supplier knows the manufacturing math and the buyer often does not," said Stephanie Feraday, President and Chief Executive Officer of aPriori Technologies. "aiSource hands the buyer the manufacturing and cost insights, in plain language, in real time. That is the change. Faster cycles and bigger savings follow from it."

aPriori is benchmarking aiSource against its own baseline to deliver measurable improvements across the negotiation process. Based on early deployments, the company is targeting 90% faster negotiation preparation, 50% faster negotiation cycles, and 3X more in realized savings compared to using aPriori without aiSource or dedicated expert services. Early beta participants have described aiSource as a fundamental shift in how their teams prepare for and execute supplier negotiations.

"aPriori has been generating objective cost and manufacturing data for over two decades. The new piece is that AI lets a non-expert use it in a live conversation," said Fielder Hiss, Chief Product Officer at aPriori. "We are not asking buyers to become engineers. We are putting an engineer's level of insight inside the workflow they already run."

aiSource is the first AI sourcing-focused solution built on the aPriori Platform, extending aPriori's cost and manufacturing intelligence into procurement workflows. It is the first in a series of AI-enabled capabilities aPriori plans to deliver over the next year.