Coupa and MIT Data Science Lab Collaboration Focusing on Predictive Business Spend Index Report

Joint initiative will create a Business Spend Index (BSI) Report to provide AI-powered predictions into future business spend and global trade, equipping businesses to build resilience

FOSTER CITY, Calif., Sept. 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Coupa, the leading AI platform for total spend management, today announced a new collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Data Science Lab to create a forward looking, predictive Business Spend Index (BSI) Report. This unique collaboration of leaders brings together data science experts from the Coupa Spend Lab with MIT's deep knowledge and expertise in AI, advanced analytics, and economic modeling.

The BSI report will leverage AI algorithms and data from Coupa's 10M+ buyer and supplier network, which consists of more than $8 trillion in spend data, and fuse it with current macroeconomic and geopolitical data, including but not limited to B2B spend and volume, sourcing events and activity, expenses, cycle times, freight rates, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Customer Purchasing Index (CPI), unemployment, inflation, and tariffs.

Delivering actionable guidance, this report hopes to leverage advanced AI to forecast future trends in business spend, helping leaders bolster business resiliency, optimize savings, and drive growth. The BSI Report will help businesses:

• Proactively manage commodity volatility – the predictive data can be used to forecast price fluctuations for key materials and commodities before they happen, enabling businesses to lock in prices with suppliers and secure their margins.
• Optimize inventory – an analysis on spend data and market trends helps businesses better understand what materials or parts are at greatest risk of being out of stock, allowing them to place orders before shortages happen.
• Improve financial forecasting – predictive spend insights can help finance teams create more accurate budgets, leveraging models that factor in market confidence, seasonal trends, and planned projects to allocate resources more effectively and with greater confidence.

The Coupa Spend Lab will team up with David Simchi-Levi, head of MIT's Data Science Lab, and his team to produce the report. Simchi-Levi is a renowned expert in supply chain. In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious INFORMS Impact Prize for playing a leading role in developing and disseminating a new highly impactful paradigm for the identification and mitigation of risks in global supply chains.

"Coupa's goal is to build the network that powers the future of global trade. With over $8 trillion in spend taking place across our platform to date, Coupa is perfectly positioned to collaborate with MIT on predicting the future of business spend," said Kevin Iaquinto, Chief Marketing Officer, Coupa. "With our Spend Lab collaborating with MIT, we'll be leveraging the full power of AI and data to predict where business spend is heading. The report will be invaluable for CEOs, CFOs, and their teams to better navigate today's uncertainty and make more intelligent, profitable decisions."

"Coupa's two-sided buyer-supplier network and rich, transactional dataset offers my team at MIT an unprecedented opportunity to study real-time business behavior at a global scale," said David Simchi-Levi, William Barton Rogers Professor of Engineering Systems. "Traditional economic indicators are limited given they often rely on surveys or lagging data. This collaboration allows us to tap into the actual flow of commerce to create a more dynamic, predictive model. Our work will provide a powerful new index for the business spend marketplace and contribute to our academic understanding of how global economic factors will influence business behavior."

The inaugural, predictive BSI report is slated to publish early in the new year.

About Coupa

Coupa is the leading AI platform for total spend management. Using its trusted, community-generated, $8 trillion dataset, Coupa brings autonomous AI agents, a network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers, and leading apps together on one unified platform to seamlessly automate the buying process and connect to customers in a whole new way. With Coupa, you'll make margins multiply™. Learn more at coupa.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).

SOURCE Coupa Software