Business and Sales · News · 🇧🇷 Brazil
Algar puts an AI robot in charge of negotiating with suppliers and saves R$ 2.8 million in purchasing
Suppla picks suppliers, gathers quotes, negotiates and issues the order in SAP, and now handles about 60% of the procurement team's requests.
- Profession
- Buyer, Executive
- Tools
- Suppla, SAP, Pipefy
- Source
- teletime.com.br ↗
- Country
- 🇧🇷 Brazil
- Report date
- November 3, 2026
- Verified on
- November 4, 2026
See more: AI for executives
What they did
Algar's Automation and AI Center of Excellence, set up in early 2024, built Suppla, a robot that runs the purchasing process end to end: it finds suppliers, organizes quotes, conducts the negotiation, compares proposals on price, shipping and delivery time and automatically creates the order in SAP. At first it only bought materials up to R$ 30,000; later it also started buying licenses and some services up to R$ 250,000. The company also created Mia, an agent that uses the Pipefy platform to check contract and financial data, open purchase requests and process invoices.
How it went
According to Algar, between March 2025 and August 2026 Suppla handled about 60% of procurement requests, moved R$ 18.45 million in contracts and saved R$ 2.8 million, a 13.17% reduction in negotiation costs. From January to August 2026 alone it saved more than R$ 917,000 across 280 orders. The center of excellence already runs more than 140 active automations.
Good to know
The numbers come from the company itself and there is no detail on how the savings were measured. The robot started with small purchases and only later got higher limits, a sensible path for anyone who wants to test something similar.
The prompt
I'm a buyer at [company] and I need to compare these supplier proposals for [item or service] [paste the proposals]. Build a table with price, shipping, delivery time, payment terms and warranty for each one, point out the best option by total cost and tell me what I can ask each supplier for in a counteroffer. If any information is missing for a fair comparison, list what I need to ask before deciding.
Replace what is in [brackets]. Prompt written by us from the account, not a literal copy of the source. Do not paste other people’s personal data (privacy laws such as LGPD and GDPR apply).
Summary in our own words. Results as stated in the original account; we have not tested or audited them. Read the source ↗ Found a mistake?
Similar cases
01A consultant with 25 years in finance lets Claude clean up his own company's overdue bookkeeping in one afternoon
Glenn Hopper gave Claude Cowork access to QuickBooks through the browser and used Claude for Excel to separate business expenses mixed into his personal cards.
02Manufacturer ZEN uses AI agents to tell in 10 minutes whether it can make a part
The Santa Catarina metalworking company built agents that run the pre-assessment of whether a part can be made on its presses, a step that took up to 17 days, and an engineer validates the result.
03An n8n agent researches trade show exhibitors and scores each one as a potential client
A consultant built a workflow that scrapes the exhibitor list, researches each company online and writes size, score and reasoning to a Google Sheet.
04Disputing a contractor's prices on a building project
A project owner gave the AI every item, the purchase order and the emails; it found charges he hadn't noticed.
05Paying an overseas supplier with an agent and human approval
An agent checks balances in several currencies and prepares the payment; a person reviews and approves it.
06Canceling insurance by phone and recovering money with an agent
Forbes reports on people who used an agent to call the insurer and cancel a policy with a refund.
07Selling a VR headset on Marketplace with an agent
With access to Facebook, the agent listed the Quest 3 and talked to buyers within a minimum price.
08University recovers US$100,000 with a treasury skill
Cornell's finance and AI teams built a skill to identify and chase unidentified payments.