Shortlist and Rank Vendors using AI

Accelerate and increase the quality of vendor investment decisions.

Many organizations are not realizing the benefits of AI. CEOs are frustrated after investing millions in AI capabilities.

When left to their own devices, managers often conduct seemingly endless analyses to minimize risk in their decision-making, particularly when evaluating and selecting vendor application software.

Save months or years by using AI to research, shortlist, and rank your most viable vendors before starting your project. This allows your project to focus on no more than three vendors, saving your organization months or even years of effort.

  • ●
    Provide early insight or confirmation of the most viable vendors.
  • ●
    Accelerate project work and decision-making by concentrating on essential needs and the top two or three most viable vendors.

Vendor Evaluation and Selection Examples

  • ●
    A Fortune 100 firm took nearly 2 years to select an ERP system for its services business.
  • ●
    A government entity spent 18 months evaluating and selecting an Agenda Management System.

AI Use Case: Shortlist and Rank Vendors

This AI use case, based on the government entity mentioned above, involves a series of prompts to generate a vendor shortlist and a ranking report for an Agenda Management System. This report was entirely generated and formatted by AI.

The vendor considered the most viable using AI (in just minutes) was the same vendor recommended by the project that took 18 months.

The prompts used in this use case are included in our Vendor Application Software Evaluation and Selection Playbook.

Notes:

  1. Most business teams know their most crucial needs before a project begins.
  2. The Vendor Shortlist and Ranking Report above was generated using Google Gemini AI, advanced prompting techniques, including Markdown syntax, and a chain of thought (CoT) prompting approach. Gemini's response was shared in Google Docs and saved as a PDF.
  3. While this use case may not be representative of a pure-strategy example (depending on the application's strategic importance), it does represent a type of project that occurs tens, perhaps hundreds, of times during the course of a year at medium- to large-sized organizations. Using 100 projects at an average cost of $500,000, a Fortune 500 company incurs $50 million annually. That doesn't include speed-to-market cost/opportunity considerations. Leveraging AI and agile selection methods, such as JITDE, could save over $ 45 million annually for this type of project and use case alone.

Here are some key mindsets, processes, and other changes needed to reduce costs and save time, based on over 200 vendor evaluation and selection projects.

  • ●
    Most project teams spend 80% of their time identifying and documenting non-essential or trivial needs.
  • ●
    Too often, evaluating many vendors consumes valuable organizational resources like people, time, CAPEX, and OPEX, without providing clear benefits.
  • ●
    Reframe a vendor application software evaluation and selection process as acquiring a configurable business process/capability. If there is a mindset of customization, such as believing your needs are unique, challenge that early, or check if there are any differentiating requirements that could give you a competitive edge that a vendor is unlikely to address. If you can't resolve that, don't consider a vendor solution.
  • ●
    Don't depend on a vendor's project manager for your implementation to succeed. Your organization must take ownership of success.
  • ●
    Please keep it simple for the initial release. You can always make adjustments and add more configurations as needed, based on the software's use.

This straightforward use case shows how AI can cut costs and save time for your organization. However, to achieve a 10X boost in performance and value from AI, you need to blend in NI (Natural Intelligence) and make essential changes to your organization, processes, structure, and technologies.

Learn more.

Hybrid Intelligence™

Blend Natural and Artificial Intelligence

The Power and Opportunity of AI and Expert Playbooks

Is it possible to conduct a one-minute vendor software evaluation and selection project solely using AI? No, not today. However, when combined with agile approaches and expert playbooks, AI can reduce your vendor selection project to three months or less, rather than the typical eight months or more.

By leveraging this AI use case, you can guide a powerful LLM to perform complex vendor evaluation and shortlisting tasks, mimicking the intelligence of a dedicated platform without the initial costs of building one from scratch.

Leaders willing to take on a moderate level of risk and who cultivate a "make it work" culture can avoid the time and cost of a multi-month or year vendor evaluation and selection effort using this use case.

We don't recommend a one-prompt decision approach at this time without further due diligence. Nonetheless, this use case, along with our just in time decision evaluation (JITDE™) approach enables a vendor decision timeline of one month or less.

The prompts used in this use case are included in our Vendor Application Software and Selection Playbook, which enables your organization to accelerate projects, cut costs, and improve the quality of your vendor choices and ultimate decision.

The Playbook offers actions, templates (mostly filled with starter content), additional AI prompts with documentation and examples, and scoring models that help verify choices. By combining the advanced AI prompts with our expert Playbook, you can empower your internal team to make vendor recommendations without the need or cost of hiring expensive management consultants.

Reminder: Always double-check and verify the AI's output, as generative AI can sometimes produce mistakes or inaccurate information.

Achieve a 10X Performance Improvement

Redesign your organization's processes, structure, and technologies to optimize AI investments and achieve a 10X performance improvement in vendor evaluation and selection projects.