Uncover Better Supplier Discounts Using ServiceNow AI

What If You Could Unlock 1.5% Savings with No Extra Headcount?

What if your procurement team could reduce supplier negotiation cycle times by up to 40% and unlock 1.5% in better supplier discounts across tail-spend categories—without hiring additional staff?

With AI, it’s no longer hypothetical; it’s tangible, measurable, and configurable in ServiceNow Source-to-Pay.

Take IT hardware and software spend as an example. Category managers often juggle thousands of line items, repetitive negotiations, and outdated pricing benchmarks. Managing tail-spend suppliers can feel like a never-ending treadmill—full of tactical work but without much strategic impact.

It’s because traditional approaches are built for consistency, not agility.

The Limitations of Traditional Procurement Processes

In many organizations, procurement still runs on spreadsheets, emails, and static lists.

Here’s why traditional models are falling behind:

Manual Negotiations Are Too Slow: Procurement teams can’t possibly negotiate with every supplier. As a result, smaller suppliers get rolled over year after year—missing opportunities for better pricing or improved terms.
Decentralized Data Leads to Poor Decisions: Without unified access to pricing history, market intelligence, or vendor performance, negotiations become reactive instead of proactive.
Tail Spend Is Ignored or Mismanaged: Many companies accept tail spend as a cost of doing business. But unmanaged tail spend can account for 20% of total spend—a massive opportunity hiding in plain sight.
Inconsistent Outcomes: Negotiation outcomes vary widely by buyer. Institutional knowledge often lives in inboxes, not systems.

These inefficiencies not only waste time—they leave money on the table.

How ServiceNow Uncovers Better Supplier Discounts

At Outcome Driven Solutions (ODS), we believe that intelligent automation is the key to improving this cycle; we’re combining ServiceNow AI with ServiceNow Source-to-Pay, to create transformative, scalable solutions that optimize supplier negotiations across all categories:

Automated Negotiations: AI agents initiate, manage, and finalize supplier negotiations based on business rules. They can propose bundle discounts, and suggest payment terms—24/7.
Integrated Market Intelligence: External integrations can pull real-time data from external and internal sources, ensuring negotiations use the most current benchmarks.
Tail-Spend Prioritization: AI identifies low-touch, high-potential suppliers that are ripe for renegotiation, helping to drive value from the bottom 20% of spend.

This is more than automation. It’s intelligent action based on strategy and rules you control.

Real-World Success Story: How a Major Retailer Turned AI Into a Competitive Edge

Faced with the same challenge as many enterprises, this retail enterprise was trying to uncover more value from suppliers without increasing team workload.

By deploying AI to engage tail-spend suppliers, they were able to achieve some stunning results:

64% of suppliers reached new agreements.
1.5% in cost savings were captured from those contracts.
Suppliers could choose from several options that offered flexibility and mutual benefits.

Key Takeaways & Call to Action

ServiceNow AI is changing the procurement game. Whether you’re dealing with thousands of SKUs, time-consuming tail-spend, or inconsistent results, automation isn’t t enough.

With Outcome Driven Solutions and ServiceNow, your organization can: