DEMO: Empowering Buyers Using aiSource

Global Manufacturers face New Market Challenges Making it Difficult to Hit Annual Cost Reduction Targets. Procurement needs to deliver at least 5% in cost reductions per year, with fewer places to find savings. Buyers go into supplier negotiations underprepared, working off gut instinct, outdated baselines, or waiting for an expert’s advice.

That’s the problem aiSource was built to solve.

aPriori’s AI-powered sourcing solution gives every buyer on your team the manufacturing cost intelligence and real-time negotiation guidance that used to live with only your most experienced negotiators — so you can find savings that aren’t obvious, and close them faster. It doesn’t replace the expertise, it scales it.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

As a Commodity Manager I’m reviewing my spend portfolio for cost reduction opportunities. I’ve had my cost engineering team run analysis, and I can see my top opportunities surfaced right here. Two parts are showing roughly $60,000 in potential annual savings each. But here’s where it gets important — I’m not just looking at the dollar value. I’m looking at the gap. The second part shows only a 3% gap between the should-cost and the supplier quote. That’s tight. Harder to close. The first part? A 20% gap. That’s where I’m going to focus.

I’m going to open that part directly in aiSource and navigate to the Negotiation Guide. I’ll enter the supplier’s quoted piece part cost so aiSource can start the comparison. Right away, aiSource returns an executive summary: the supplier quote, aPriori’s should-cost estimate, and a clear breakdown of the opportunity in front of me. No interpretation required. It breaks the cost down into three buckets: material, manufacturing, and secondary process costs — with the key assumptions driving each one laid out plainly. And then it does something most tools don’t: it asks me to get the same cost breakdown from the supplier so AI Source can analyze where the actual gap lives and start coaching on how to close it.

The supplier comes back. Their material cost: approximately $220. Manufacturing cost: also approximately $220. I enter that into aiSource and it immediately identifies that material cost is the primary gap. Manufacturing is a secondary issue, but smaller. It guides me to focus on material and tells me exactly what questions to ask the supplier and what assumptions I should be capturing so we can dig deeper. The supplier comes back with their material assumptions. They’re using perimeter milling to cut out the parts — getting about 28 parts per sheet with roughly 4% material utilization. aiSource pulls the relevant data from the aPriori estimate and puts it in a language you can easily understand.

The aPriori model shows significantly more parts per sheet, and explains why: the supplier’s perimeter milling process is the inefficiency. Water jet cutting would be more cost-effective, delivering better material utilization and a lower unit cost. aiSource doesn’t just flag the gap. It tells me why it exists, what the trade-off is, and recommends I go back to the supplier and ask them to explore switching cutting processes.

Now — I’m a buyer, not a manufacturing engineer. I’m not fully comfortable pushing back on a process decision without a second opinion. So I leave a comment directly in aiSource, flagging my cost expert. They get an email notification automatically. The cost expert jumps in and runs a perimeter milling scenario to double-check the comparison.

The numbers confirm it: perimeter milling gives roughly 4% utilization and 29 parts per sheet. The supplier’s assumptions aren’t wrong, they’re just using the wrong process. Water jet cutting comes back at $356 versus $423 for perimeter milling. The gap is real, and most of it is material-driven. The cost expert replies back to me directly in aiSource to push back on the supplier. Water jet cutting is clearly the better process. I now have everything I need. I go back to the supplier with the data, explain the process comparison, and ask if they can switch to water jet cutting. They can. They make the switch, achieve a comparable parts-per-sheet yield, and reduce the quote from $440 down to $360. I ask aiSource to summarize where we stand and what to do next. It tells me: we started at $440, we’re now at $360, we’ve closed the majority of the gap — and at this point, continuing to push on this part has diminishing return. It recommends I close out this opportunity and move to the next one.

Let’s recap what just happened. We started with a $440 supplier quote against a $356 aPriori estimate. aiSource identified the root cause — an inefficient cutting process — guided the buyer through the conversation with the supplier, enabled real-time collaboration with the cost expert, and closed 18% of the gap: $60,000 in potential savings captured.

And that was one part. Now imagine scaling that across your entire procurement team — every buyer, every negotiation, every part in your spend portfolio — running with the same depth of intelligence your most experienced negotiators use today. Consistently. Without waiting for a cost expert every time. That’s what aiSource delivers.