Billy the Bot
in Procurement
Stampli’s AI copilot translates free-text requests into structured financial data — and much more.
How Stampli’s AI assists you in procurement
Billy the Bot, Stampli’s AI copilot, streamlines procurement by eliminating manual tasks, improving accuracy, and accelerating approvals. It automatically converts employees’ free-text purchase requests into structured financial data, which keeps the system simple for employees while reducing the burden on procurement teams. Billy also recommends approvers, proactively prepares POs, and intelligently learns from past purchasing patterns to increase efficiency across the entire procurement lifecycle.
The old way: Procurement before Billy
Most employees submit purchase requests without understanding the financial details required by procurement teams, leading to vague, incomplete, or inaccurate information. This forces procurement staff to manually review, correct, and structure these requests while chasing down missing information through time-consuming email or chat exchanges. Additionally, they must determine appropriate approvers based on complex criteria, convert free-text into structured data, and ensure compliance with vendor policies—all manually, creating bottlenecks and increasing error risk.
Stampli’s approach
Only Stampli offers an AI copilot built on nearly a decade of continuous learning from processing over $100B in annual customer transactions. Unlike competitors who treat AI as an add-on, Billy is deeply integrated into procurement workflows, automatically structuring free-text requests into formatted financial data, recommending approvers based on historical patterns, and splitting multi-item or multi-vendor requests without manual intervention. By eliminating these tedious manual tasks, Billy enables procurement teams to process requests faster with greater accuracy, reduce back-and-forth communications, and focus on strategic initiatives instead of administrative work.
Key features
Converting free-text requests
Billy converts free-text purchase requests into structured financial data for any procurement outcome, including purchase orders, service tickets, and virtual card requests, based on customer-specific formatting rules.
Splitting multi-item requests into individual items
Billy detects when a request includes multiple items within a single description and automatically splits them into separate lines on the purchase order.
Splitting a multi-vendor request into individual POs
Billy automatically identifies when items in a request need to be sourced from multiple vendors and proactively prepares separate purchase orders.
Identifying preferred items automatically
Billy analyzes spending patterns and automatically identifies commonly used or finance-approved items, helping procurement teams ensure compliance and streamline purchasing decisions.
Suggesting approval workflows
Billy recommends approvers for any request based on factors like requester, initial approver, request type, amount, company, location, department, vendor, and created date.
Continuously optimizing procurement workflows
Billy learns procurement patterns over time to improve accuracy, speed, and efficiency across all processes.
FAQ
How does Billy help with employee purchase requests?
Billy transforms vague, free-text purchase requests into properly structured financial data without requiring employees to understand procurement terminology. Employees can simply describe what they need in natural language, and Billy will automatically format it correctly, categorize it appropriately, and suggest the right approvers for routing. This eliminates the back-and-forth typically required when employees submit incomplete information while maintaining a simple user experience for requesters.
How does Billy determine which approvers to recommend for a purchase request?
Billy analyzes multiple factors to recommend the most appropriate approvers, including the requester’s department, request type, purchase amount, vendor, cost center, location, and company. It also learns from historical approval patterns in your organization, constantly improving its recommendations based on past decisions. This eliminates the manual work of determining approval chains and speeds up the entire request process.
How does Billy handle situations where multiple items are requested together?
Billy automatically detects when a request contains multiple items and intelligently splits them into separate line items on the purchase order. Similarly, if items need to be sourced from different vendors, Billy will proactively prepare separate purchase orders for each vendor. This automation eliminates the manual work typically required to restructure complex requests and ensures accurate processing without procurement team intervention.
How does Billy's AI capability compare to other procurement solutions?
Billy’s AI capabilities are built on nearly a decade of continuous learning and real-world application, processing more than $100B in customer transactions annually. Unlike competitors who offer AI as a supplementary feature, Billy is deeply integrated into every aspect of the procurement workflow. This deep integration allows Billy to deliver unmatched accuracy in structuring data, recommending approvers, and optimizing purchasing decisions, resulting in significantly greater automation and efficiency gains compared to other solutions.