Next, the team set about fleshing out the buying process by expanding functionality further to enable vendor and stakeholder management. Now companies were able to issue full RFPs and RFIs, saving months of research and increasing success rates. No more cat-herding, no more inboxes chock-full of vendor emails—Olive users could be fully in control of the software sourcing process.

Including pricing and early-stage discovery functionality, Olive’s use cases expanded beyond RFIs and RFPs to offer vendor lifecycle management tools, making it a must-have resource for all parts of the software sourcing process.

Now, buyers could use Olive for:

• Early-stage project discovery
• Build vs. buy decisions
• Vendor management
• Tracking tech stack ROI

This additional functionality enabled many consulting firms to take advantage of Olive to deliver significantly more value to their clients.

Taking advantage of advances in generative AI, the team incorporated artificial intelligence across the application to help recommend requirements and solutions to potential buyers. The Olive AI now offers a co-pilot in all major IT decisions, guiding them each step of the way with data (not bias).

This functionality gives teams much of the benefit they would get from a third-party consultant, or an internal PMO team, without having to make those capital-intensive investments. Buyers can rest easy knowing they made the right decision, one without vendor influence, while vendors can make a right-fit sale that increases the likelihood of client retention.

After building a wealth of data over the years, Olive can now collate that data to produce detailed reports on top software categories based on real peer information. Olive’s ability to produce these reports without the need for vendor financing enables Olive to deliver the first truly unbiased analyst reports.