Autonomous negotiations expert Anabella Martinelli: Human collaboration is more important than ever with AI

When procurement professionals need someone to talk to about their autonomous negotiations, Anabella Martinelli is one person they can turn to.

"People often assume that we'll have less human connection in the age of AI, but I see the opposite happening," says Anabella. "When AI takes care of more monotonous, lower level tasks and extends our capabilities to unlock value, it actually requires more strategic thinking from us and that means more discussions with each other to inform that thinking. That's what I'm here to help with."

As a Senior Implementation Manager at Pactum AI, Anabella supports procurement professionals in teams spread around the world. She regularly provides training sessions to help them understand their tools for conducting autonomous negotiations, but also gets involved in higher level collaboration.

"Each company using Pactum for autonomous negotiations gets a designated Negotiation Success Manager who is always available to assist buyers with any issues or questions," she explains. "They've got continuous support over email. In addition though, we have begun regular virtual drop-in sessions when anyone can turn up and speak live to myself or others. We can answer simple questions and troubleshoot, but also spend time brainstorming ideas for getting even more value out of their autonomous negotiations by talking through what kind of spend might be best suited and what kind of trade offs might work best as parameters."

Anabella, who can conduct collaboration sessions in both English and Spanish, says that there is no typical user of Pactum's negotiation suite because Fortune 500 companies using Pactum have diverse procurement teams spread across different regions globally,

"Their attitudes to AI also vary greatly," she adds. "Some are really enthusiastic and see AI as a powerful tool that enhances their productivity, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks. Others are much more apprehensive, at least at first, fearing that AI might replace their jobs. The more people conduct autonomous negotiations, the more those fears are dispelled though. They can see that this is unlocking more value but that people like them are absolutely essential for achieving that. It's them who deserve the credit for the value generated from them using AI. So there is a growing understanding, especially with autonomous negotiations, that AI is here to assist rather than replace them."

Her drop-in sessions have even provided feedback to improve the tools.

"One user reported that entering line items individually into the negotiation suite was time-consuming due to their large number of items. In response, we quickly developed an upload template that allows them to copy and paste from an Excel spreadsheet. This solution greatly reduced the amount of manual work required so was a great result for everyone. I'd love to keep hearing more ideas about design changes that could help people conduct more autonomous negotiations."

"We are all working together at the forefront of AI and discovering new things along the way that helps unlock even more value. That starts with better understanding the tools available and discussing their use with each other. But I'm especially excited about how we can collaborate more and what that means for people, especially in procurement, to deliver more value to their business and take on a bigger, more strategic role."