Webinar recording: AI agents in practice – How Koepfer fends off price increases and conducts negotiations

Price increases have Procurement been the norm in industrial Procurement . At the same time, demands for speed, traceability, and quality of preparation are increasing. Many purchasing organizations are faced with the task of responding more quickly without building up additional capacity.

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In the webinar "AI agents in practice – How Koepfer fends off price increases and conducts negotiations," Marcel Schweizer (Head of Procurement & IT, Koepfer) and Simon Vötter (Tacto) show how Koepfer is already using AI agents productively to significantly simplify price defense and negotiation preparation.

Initial situation – high costs associated with price increases

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At Koepfer, the number of price increase announcements increased noticeably, especially at the turn of the year. Each inquiry required manual preparation: checking price trends, researching indices, compiling arguments. This took around 30 minutes per case.

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Similar efforts were also required in document management and the follow-up to negotiations. Information was scattered, comparisons were time-consuming, and many steps were repeated.

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AI agents as pragmatic support

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Koepfer specifically relies on AI agents to relieve the team of operational tasks. The aim is not to replace humans in decision-making, but to eliminate tedious routine tasks and create a solid factual basis. The agents scan internal data and historical price and volume trends and compare them with external market and commodity indices. This allows irregularities to be identified at an early stage and presented in a structured manner.

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Fighting price increases with the "Defender Agent"

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The Defender Agent is a real highlight. As soon as a price increase arrives, the AI automatically analyzes the letter, classifies the claim, and immediately provides the appropriate counterarguments.

The result speaks for itself: preparation time is reduced from half an hour to just a few minutes. At the same time, the argumentation becomes much sharper, as indices and comparative values are incorporated seamlessly.

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Versatile in use

In addition to price defense, agents provide support in the following areas:

• Document management: Automated maintenance of certificates and contracts.
• Preparing for negotiations: Always up-to-date dossiers and benchmarks at your fingertips.
• Offer comparisons: Automatic harmonization of different RFQ formats.

In this webinar, Marcel Schweizer and Simon Vötter demonstrate how Koepfer not only saves time with AI support, but also gains massive strategic clout.

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