Source Assist: Elevate Strategic Sourcing with AI
Source Assist targets procurement leaders, sourcing managers, and category managers who oversee complex strategic sourcing processes. It's designed for organizations with procurement departments that regularly manage competitive bidding processes requiring significant administrative effort.
Strategic sourcing is traditionally labor intensive, with procurement teams spending 62% of their time on administrative tasks rather than strategic activities. RFx cycles typically take 45+ days, with 42% of RFPs requiring post issuance clarifications, and teams investing 30+ labor hours per process. This creates bottlenecks, inconsistent vendor communications, evaluation delays, and difficulty maintaining audit trails and compliance. Procurement leaders struggle to demonstrate value while their teams are bogged down in paperwork.
Source Assist transforms this reality by deploying purpose built AI agents that automate the entire strategic sourcing lifecycle. Organizations implementing Source Assist can achieve measurable business impact with up to a 70% reduction in RFx cycle times, 75% reduction in administrative work, 85% fewer document errors through AI driven consistency checks, and 65% reduction in labor hours per RFx process. This translates directly to faster time to value, enhanced compliance, better supplier decisions, and the ability to handle more sourcing events with existing staff.
Unlike competitors, who offer basic automation with limited AI capabilities, Source Assist delivers truly autonomous agentic AI that orchestrates the entire process from intake to award. It uniquely combines ServiceNow's workflow capabilities with advanced AI agents that collaborate with procurement teams, intelligently processing documents, responding to vendor inquiries, evaluating proposals, and generating selection recommendations, all while maintaining a comprehensive audit trail. This end to end agentic approach delivers significantly higher ROI than piecemeal solutions that address only portions of the sourcing lifecycle.
Source Assist orchestrates the full strategic sourcing lifecycle through AI agents that collaborate with humans, requiring manual intervention only at key approval points.
The application follows a structured set of Use Cases that align to the strategic sourcing process, where specialized sets of AI agents handle distinct phases of the stratetic sourcing lifecycle:
- Sourcing Request Intake: AI agents collect, validate, and approve new strategic sourcing requests by checking them against organizational policies and standards.
- RFx Document Creation: AI agents retrieve validated request data and automatically generate comprehensive, compliant RFx documents for approval.
- Vendor Q&A Management: The system processes vendor questions during the competitive bidding process, generating consistent and fair responses while maintaining neutrality.
- Vendor Evaluation: AI agents streamline the assessment of vendor proposals against predefined evaluation criteria, ensuring objective scoring and standardized comparisons.
- Vendor Selection: Decision support agents compare top ranked proposals, generate selection justifications, and prepare award communications.
The application is built as a scoped ServiceNow application, maintaining data integrity while integrating seamlessly with the Now Platform. It leverages modern ServiceNow capabilities including Now Assist AI Agents, Now Assist Skill Kit, and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to access organizational knowledge and policies.
Initial Release
Required ServiceNow Products:
- Now Assist license (Pro Plus/Enterprise Plus)
Required Plugins/Dependencies:
- Now Assist AI Agents (scope: sn_aia)
- Now Assist Skill Kit (scope: sn_skill_builder)
- Now Assist for Creator
- Now Assist for a product