With approximately $3 trillion in enterprise spend running through its Business Spend Management platform, Coupa Software Inc. makes a compelling case for digital transformation and data insight.

The company leveraged its Coupa Inspire event in Las Vegas last week to announce an initiative for community-based spending benchmarks using artificial intelligence tools, dashboard support for activities that indirectly impact an organization’s value chain, and enhancements for supply chain modeling.

TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, covered the Coupa Inspire conference through numerous interviews with company executives and partners during the event. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are three insights you might have missed:

1. A ‘thoughtful’ business approach could pay off in the long run for Coupa, in contrast with the state of tech today

In the millisecond-paced, fail-fast and break-things culture of today’s technology world, the word “thoughtful” is not usually applied when discussing business plans. Yet that is precisely how Coupa’s chief executive, Rob Bernshteyn (pictured), chose to characterize his company’s approach during an interview with theCUBE’s Lisa Martin.

“We’re trying to be very thoughtful with this business,” Bernshteyn said. “We’re trying not to grow so fast that suddenly we leave our customers behind. Our customers stay with us, and they add more and more capabilities. That drives an incredible cash-flow situation for our business, and that makes us very resilient.”

Setting aside the current volatility in Coupa’s stock value, there are signs that the company’s thoughtful business approach could pave the way for long-term success. An analysis conducted by SiliconANGLE last fall noted Coupa’s positive customer support and favorable spending momentum, based on data supplied by Enterprise Technology Research.

More recently, the company won FedRAMP approval, which will allow it to pursue potentially lucrative software contracting deals with federal agencies. Coupa estimates that it has only penetrated approximately 20% of Global 2000 companies, leaving plenty of room for market expansion. And executives have indicated that Coupa is entering the next fiscal year with the largest pipeline in company history.

Watch the complete interview with Bernshteyn below:

2. Analytics have crossed the chasm for business impact

The progress of artificial intelligence has been infused with a healthy dose of skepticism. It took decades for enterprises to gain confidence in using the technology, and many of the early business use cases were tactical, low-level decisions versus more significant actions affecting personal or financial safety. Today, AI is present in self-driving cars, medical screening and fraud-alert networks for the world’s major credit card processors.

Coupa has provided a prime example of how far AI has come with its Community.ai initiative. The strength of AI rests on data, and over a decade ago, Coupa began structuring its contracts so the firm could take anonymized customer data and pool it for analysis that would benefit its client community as a whole.

Community.ai was announced in February as an AI-driven platform that leverages data from trillions in enterprise spend and Coupa’s 2,000 customers to gain deeper spending insights and improve decision making for clients. It has emerged as a prime example of how AI’s value can be used as a shared resource for any business.

“The vision was always a data-centric model where we could apply AI to that data and create intelligence,” said Donna Wilczek, senior vice president of product strategy and innovation at Coupa, during an interview with theCUBE. “We’re finally at a volume of data where we can anonymize it and create insights at a level that we were not able to do 10 years ago. It really has been a journey.”

Watch the complete interview with Wilczek below:

3. The metaverse and Web3 are going to dramatically change how the world operates

Brian McKillips, managing director at Accenture PLC, made some key points in an interview during Coupa Inspire about how the global economic structure and key marketplaces have entered a period of significant change.

In March, Accenture released a new report that documented how technologies, such as extended reality, blockchain, digital twins and edge computing, were coming together and reshaping the human experience. Accenture surveyed over 4,600 business leaders and found that 71% of executives believed the metaverse will have a positive impact on their organizations.

The report coincided with announcement of the Accenture Metaverse Continuum business group, which will be led by two high-ranking executives from the consulting firm. Accenture believes that the metaverse will lead to re-platforming of digital experiences and the new technologies driving the crypto world of Web3 will pioneer ways in which data supports this new paradigm.

“We’ve lived in a world where transactions took place in a very predictable way with local currencies through a single channel,” McKillips said. “The fundamentals of the economy or in the marketplace are starting to change in terms of how we transact with things like cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens, things that weren’t even mainline words six or 12 months ago.”

Watch the complete interview with McKillips below:

You can catch up on SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s complete coverage of the Coupa Inspire event on theCUBE’s dedicated event channel.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Coupa Inspire event. Neither Coupa Software Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE