SoftwareOne case study

Oxygen Finance uses GenAI to provide more insights to clients

Oxygen Finance wanted to use GenAI to identify public sector procurement opportunities for its customers. Working with SoftwareOne and Microsoft, it built a solution that increases research breadth without impacting quality.

Gathering pre-procurement data about spending decisions at more than 1,000 public sector organisations in the United Kingdom was a never-ending task for the UK-based research team at Oxygen Finance. But that data was vital to maintain a key software-as-a-service product that Oxygen Finance customers depend on – Oxygen Insights. Oxygen Insights Pre-Procurement is a highly valued part of the Insights offering used by customers of all sizes to identify and learn about new opportunities prior to the commencement of a procurement process by public sector organisations, enabling more time to develop a strategy to win new business.

Oxygen Finance knew that keeping up with public sector publications was a challenge. Rob Parker, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, believed that machine learning and generative AI could help to automate some of the work that was being done manually by the research team. Such a system, he reasoned, could augment the team’s work and capture public sector spending information that was hard to locate. This would help Oxygen Finance’s experienced researchers to expand the breadth of the company’s pre-procurement intelligence, enabling the team to bring more opportunities to light and add even greater value to clients.

While attending a Microsoft event, Parker learned about the data and AI work that SoftwareOne was doing and spoke with the SoftwareOne cloud and AI experts about Oxygen Finance’s challenges. That conversation clearly demonstrated to him that SoftwareOne had deep expertise in AI-driven data solutions, an ability to deliver AI solutions on Microsoft Azure at scale and a successful track record in procurement intelligence. This led Oxygen Finance to go all-in with SoftwareOne to work on such a solution.

>60% reduction
in data processing times
>40% more procurement data
summarised for Oxygen Insights
>90% accuracy
in automated reports

Client: Oxygen Finance
Industry: Finance, Information technology
Platform: Azure Cloud
Services: Application Services: Data and AI, Microsoft Azure
Country: United Kingdom

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Seeking a way to identify public sector spending cues

Founded in 2004 and based in Birmingham in the United Kingdom, Oxygen Finance helps public sector organisations and their suppliers to manage procurement and payments for goods and services. It offers a cloud-based service called Oxygen Insights that helps businesses learn about opportunities to sell to the public sector. A small Oxygen Finance research team identifies these opportunities by reviewing public sector websites, meeting minutes and other public records for discussions about procurement matters.

For example, the team might find a local council conversation about plans to update an ERP system, which could signal a potential bidding opportunity for companies that provide such systems. Every month, the research team reviews thousands of public sector records to update the information that Oxygen Insights provides to customers.

Since Oxygen Insights was launched in 2013, it has tracked more than GBP7.8 trillion in public sector spending data and supported the awarding of more than 65,000 government contracts. But the company knew there were additional sectors and more procurement opportunities that it could bring into scope that were currently restricted by the laborious manual research required to find relevant information. After learning of SoftwareOne’s AI and data expertise and deep experience in working with Microsoft Azure, Oxygen Finance decided to work with SoftwareOne to develop an automated system that could help to identify and gather public sector procurement information that the research team might be missing.

Building a proof of concept using OpenAI’s GPT-4o

Working in collaboration with SoftwareOne and Microsoft, Oxygen Finance developed a plan to create an AI-powered tool that could help identify procurement discussions in public sector records and automatically generate reports for customers based on that information. SoftwareOne assigned a data team based in Europe to lead the project. Microsoft also provided financial support for the project through its Azure Innovate fund.

Using a decade-plus worth of data from Oxygen Insights, the team began training a model using Microsoft Azure and OpenAI’s GPT-4o to intelligently automate the research process. They developed the proof of concept over a period of two-and-a-half months, with repeated rounds of training to enable the model to recognise potential buying signals in public sector data.

The solution was designed to use an advanced web crawler to search a set of targeted online sources and extract relevant data from PDFs, Word documents and other types of information. It uses Azure Blob Storage to securely and scalably organise and manage that data, and Azure OpenAI to summarise and categorise information. To ensure that data is easy to retrieve and act on, SoftwareOne used prompt engineering to fine-tune categories to align with the existing templates used for Oxygen Insights.

We’ve got an expert team that reviews every public sector body within the UK every month to understand if any new things have been published. It’s obviously quite a laborious job – and a prime candidate for AI.

Rob Parker

Chief Technology Officer, Oxygen Finance

Could you benefit from a similar service?

Want to enhance your procurement strategy with AI? Speak with our experts to explore a tailored solution.

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Could you benefit from a similar service?

Want to enhance your procurement strategy with AI? Speak with our experts to explore a tailored solution.

The team designed the system to intelligently integrate new information that it found with the existing data in Oxygen Insights. This provides a clear timeline of discussions and publications as a procurement process progresses and matures. Generative AI is then used to automatically generate reports that are tailored to users’ needs and specifications. The solution was designed to enhance data accuracy as much as possible while reducing the need for manual intervention. To ensure trust and transparency for customers, Oxygen Finance manually reviews every report that’s generated using AI and clearly labels each one to distinguish these reports from human-researched data. This checking ensures that data quality is maintained and also provides feedback to further train the AI solution.

After testing showed that the solution was performing according to expectations, Oxygen Finance went into production in December 2024.

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More, and faster, procurement insights for customers

Using the AI-powered solution, Oxygen Finance has improved its data processing times by 60% and can summarise 40% more public sector procurement insights for its customers. Careful training and testing have resulted in an automated solution that is 90% accurate. This ensures that AI-sourced procurement data is reliable, and meets Oxygen’s high standards. It also alleviates previous apprehensions among the research team about the use of AI. To ensure transparency for customers, the research team manually reviews every AI-generated report before it’s published, and each report is clearly labelled as being automatically generated.

Parker credits the solution’s success in part to SoftwareOne’s strong capabilities in data, AI and Microsoft technologies, along with its consistent and regular communication throughout the project.

Increased public sector spending and legislative change have increased the availability of pre-procurement data. By removing much of the manual burden, AI will allow our existing team to capture this data, improving speed-to-market and the depth and breadth of our coverage.

Rob Parker

Chief Technology Officer, Oxygen Finance

In addition to working to continually refine and improve the solution, Oxygen Finance is now working with SoftwareOne on a second project. This will add new capabilities to Oxygen Insights to target additional categories of pre-procurement and spend that aren’t currently served by the company. Oxygen Finance’s SaaS business was already growing significantly, with a 27% increase in 2024, and Parker expects this will help to drive even more growth in the future.

We’re able to check and re-check a lot more quickly, so this can now be done on a daily basis using the AI solution. And we can use our team to optimise and improve the process rather than just going on the treadmill of checking and writing. It’s been really transformational for us and we’re seeing huge benefits from it.

Rob Parker

Chief Technology Officer, Oxygen Finance

Oxygen Finance uses GenAI to provide more insights to clients

>60% reduction

>40% more procurement data

>90% accuracy

Seeking a way to identify public sector spending cues

Building a proof of concept using OpenAI’s GPT-4o

Could you benefit from a similar service?

Could you benefit from a similar service?

Data and AI Services

More, and faster, procurement insights for customers

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