Unimarket, a global leader bringing clarity, control, and impact to Source-to-Pay solutions, announced the launch of Beacon, a platform-wide AI capability built directly into Unimarket's procurement and spend management platform. Beacon is designed to give procurement, finance and buying teams, the answers they need, the moment they need them through a familiar chat bot style interface, helping address the searching, guessing, and waiting that has long slowed procurement down.

Embedded platform-wide, Beacon assists with recurring, time-consuming tasks, such as; surfacing relevant policy as Buyers go to market, extracting key contract and invoice data, and surfacing information a buyer needs as soon as a question arises. The result is compliant purchasing pathways, faster time-to-answer, and less manual work for teams managing sourcing, contracts, purchasing, and invoicing.

"Beacon reflects what we've always believed about AI in procurement, it should feel like a knowledgeable colleague, not another portal to search," said Phil Kenney, CEO at Unimarket. "It's built into the platform our customers already use every day, so the value shows up immediately: fewer compliance exceptions, faster cycle times, and real time impact for team members who spend too long on manual admin tasks."

"This is about giving procurement and finance teams a partner that's present the moment they need it, no matter the time or day," Kenney added.

"This is an exciting step for Unimarket as we embed fit-for-purpose AI into our platform in a meaningful and impactful way for our users," said Justin Gillion, Unimarket's Chief Product Officer. "The capability of Beacon is based on the experiences and day-to-day challenges our users have across procurement and finance and has been built to specifically address these roadblocks and areas for efficiency improvements, directly."

"This is just the first phase of Beacon, we'll continue to enhance and develop our AI capability to bring more relevant use cases and features, driving time savings, compliance, and better insights for customers across our Source-to-Pay platform," Gillion added.

Unimarket serves organizations across higher education, healthcare, government, research institutions, and enterprise markets in the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and Beacon is rolling out across the platform in all these markets.