Last week, B2B automation startup Aiah launched a new cloud-based platform to digitize users’ procurement processes. According to the company, the tool promises to speed up procurement, save costs, glean insights into spending, and improve supplier relationships for businesses.
Founded in 2013, Aiah is an intelligent process automation platform that allows companies to execute repetitive transactions as well as interact with employees and customers at scale. They do this through the use of robotic process automation (RPA). RPA is a stepping stone towards full artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions that captures and interprets applications for processing transactions, manipulating data, triggering responses, and communicating with other digital systems.
“We automate repetitive tasks not only because it saves time and effort, but also because we believe humans should focus on creativity, analysis, and problem solving,” said Gian Paulo de la Rama, Aiah CEO and co-founder.
Owned by mother company InnoVantage, Inc, Aiah was co-founded by De la Rama, Joyce Villadolid (COO), and Alvin Aldrich Abrogena, and lists Wavemaker Partners, Patamar Capital, Kickstart Ventures, and the Draper Venture Network among their early investors.
Since launching, the startup has focused largely on building out their flagship product, a suite of conversational commerce tools that allows companies to engage in one-on-one conversations at scale, from within the leading social channels. This c-commerce toolkit offers the ability to launch digital storefronts, run by chatbots, within apps like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Viber.
Users begin by selecting from a number of conversation templates that they can then customize to fit the products and processes of their businesses. After tailoring the conversation flow and linking their social media accounts, they can then publish the automated chatbot and monitor its progress from a centralized insight dashboard. According to the company, this entire process, from customizing a template to launching the store within one’s social media accounts, can take less than an hour.
To date, Aiah’s c-commerce platform has automated about 110 million interactions across over two million customers, processing roughly $10 million in gross merchandise value. According to the company, these have led to a three-fold increase in leads for their users, a 10x increase in engagement, and 50% decrease in customer acquisition costs. Among these clients is Globe Telecom. Aiah currently powers the Facebook Messenger bots managing customer service for both their Broadband and GCash services.
Now, the company is adding a second offering, developed out of their own pain points as a company.
“We’ve been operating for almost 10 years and still, one of our biggest challenges is not getting paid on time,” said CEO and Co-founder Gian Paulo de la Rama. “One of the reasons for this is that most companies still rely on manual or spreadsheet and email based processes for purchases and consequently invoice payments. So in order to help our customers automate their procurement and invoice processing—and maybe help us get paid on time—we developed and are launching Aiah Procurement.”
Aiah Procurement is a cloud-based app designed for businesses looking to transition from spreadsheet vendor tracking to a more automated platform. Aiah takes their expertise in RPA systems to help purchasing departments better manage their vendors and run analytics to unlock critical insights into their purchasing processes. Just as with their c-commerce tools, it’s a system designed to work out of the box, requiring minimal development and easily integrating into existing workflows.
According to the company, users can expect to streamline their procurement workflows by up to 30%; reduce supplier management, purchasing, and invoice processing costs by as much as 80%; and glean actionable insights for better decision making.
Aiah is now offering free demos for their procurement platform through their website.