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Challenge 05

AI Purchasing
Decision Engine

Build an AI-powered assistant that turns messy purchasing research into a clear, defensible recommendation.

The problem

Purchasing decisions are among the most consequential and time-consuming choices an organization makes, yet decision-makers still wade through vendor marketing pages, informal recommendations, and ad-hoc spreadsheets.

Procurement analysis is slow, inconsistent, and difficult to justify after the fact. Teams restart from zero, criteria shift between options, assumptions go unstated, and the decision becomes hard to defend months or years later.

The challenge is to replace that process with an AI-powered assistant that maps real requirements to comparable products and produces a recommendation a stakeholder can act on without doing additional research.

Focus 01

Capture real requirements

Translate stakeholder needs, constraints, usage patterns, budget limits, and must-have capabilities into a structured decision profile.

Focus 02

Normalize the catalog

Compare vendors on a consistent basis even when product pages, pricing models, capabilities, and assumptions are presented differently.

Focus 03

Make it auditable

Show the reasoning, tradeoffs, assumptions, simulations, and evidence behind the final recommendation so leadership can defend the decision.

What you are building

A purchasing assistant that turns vendor noise into a defensible decision.

Build an AI-powered assistant that takes a user's real requirements, stress-tests them against a structured product catalog, simulates real-world usage costs and performance, and delivers a clear recommendation.

The system should map actual usage patterns to product capabilities, run realistic cost projections, compare options on a normalized basis, and preserve the assumptions behind the evaluation.

The strongest solutions will make a decision faster without making it less rigorous: stakeholders should understand why the recommendation was made, where it is uncertain, and what would change the answer.

Provided resources

Starter material

These articles provide context on why B2B purchasing stalls, why buyers remain dissatisfied, and why procurement teams are prioritizing digital transformation.