What happens when two of enterprise procurement’s biggest technology players sit down without a host or a script? In this week’s special takeover edition, we thought its high-time to find out.
Recorded live at Coupa Inspire in Las Vegas, Greg Harbor, Chief Partner Officer at Coupa teams up with Chinmay Joshi, Senior Manager, Global Strategic Alliances at AWS, to explore how strategic partnerships, AI and cloud technology are reshaping procurement and supply chain management.
Together, they discuss AI agents, Coupa’s US$10tn spend dataset and why interoperability will define the next era of enterprise technology. From 163 agents built in a single day to real, measurable traction across banking, manufacturing and higher education, this is one AI conversation you won’t want to miss.
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The conversation opens with the story of how the Coupa and AWS relationship evolved from informal infrastructure usage into a formal strategic collaboration agreement.
For both, the shift matters because it changes what’s possible: moving from vendor and customer to genuine co-innovation partners, going to market together and solving shared customer challenges rather than operating in parallel.
Coupa’s spend dataset – nearly $10tn of real procurement transactions built up over two decades – sits at the heart of this discussion.
Greg explains why this is fundamentally different from scraped internet data: it’s domain-specific, transaction-level intelligence across sourcing, contracts, supplier management and category strategy. Combined with AWS infrastructure, both believe it creates the foundation for genuinely intelligent procurement decision-making.
The proof point that landed hardest at the event: a single AI agent reviewed 21,000 contracts in six months.
One of the most energetic moments in the conversation is the DevCon story – Coupa’s inaugural agent-building event, where 163 agents were submitted in a single day. For both Greg and Chinmay, the initiative illustrated something really important: that the appetite to build is already there.
Coupa Compose, launched at Inspire, gives partners and customers an agent studio to build on. The core principle both keep returning to is interoperability, where agents need to work across platforms, not just within one vendor’s ecosystem.
Despite the pace of AI development, neither Greg nor Chinmay believes technology replaces human relationships – a common theme in these kinds of discussions, but one worth reiterating. Greg frames it directly: procurement is the business of trade, and trade is fundamentally human.
AI should remove repetitive work and surface better intelligence, freeing people to spend more time on the supplier relationships and commercial judgements that actually create value.
The closing exchange is one of the most grounded parts of the conversation. Both agree the partnership will be measured not by the technology deployed but by demonstrable customer success based on metrics like faster innovation, stronger resilience and procurement performance that organisations can show at board level.
Greg points to early traction already emerging across banking in Australia, manufacturing in Japan and higher education in North America.
Episode 13 is brought to you by Amazon Business, the one-stop destination for everything your organisation needs.
Catch up on Episode 12, featuring Ben Terry, Chief Procurement Officer at evoke, discussing curiosity, commercial thinking and the future of AI in procurement.
Sr Manager Global Strategic Alliances (SCM)
Chief Partner Officer
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