Instant procurement guidance. Every buyer. Every time.

Policy Guide – powered by Beacon AI is the AI-powered procurement co-pilot that lives inside your workflow, delivering real-time, policy-aligned guidance to every buyer in your organization, 24 hours a day.

No more manual policy searches. No more waiting on your procurement team. No more inconsistent decisions. Just clear, confident answers, grounded in your own procurement policy.

Why organizations choose Policy Guide – powered by Beacon AI

Procurement teams in higher education, government, and healthcare are under constant pressure to do more with less. When non-procurement staff can't find answers quickly, they work around the process, creating compliance risk, audit exposure, and unnecessary overhead. Policy Guide eliminates the gap between policy intent and buyer behavior.

Features that make procurement effortless for buyers.

Plain-language procurement requests

Buyers describe what they need in the way they'd ask a colleague — "I need to engage a contractor for a 6-month IT project" or "We want to buy new AV equipment for a conference room." No forms. No jargon. No training required.

Intelligent follow-up questions

Policy Guide doesn't wait for perfect inputs. It asks targeted follow-up questions to gather the details it needs around spend value, risk level, supplier type, category, and uses them to deliver specific, policy-aligned recommendations.

Policy-based guidance, every time

Once the criteria are established, Policy Guide provides a clear recommendation that reflects your organization’s procurement rules exactly. Consistent answers, every time, without the procurement team needing to be involved.

24/7 self-service

Policy Guide works around the clock – if you’re online, it’s online. Buyers in different time zones, in different departments or on different campuses, get instant answers without waiting for business hours or for a procurement team member to respond.

Powerful tools for procurement administrators

Smart policy ingestion

Upload your procurement policy and let Policy Guide – powered by Beacon AI do the heavy lifting.

• Simply upload existing policy documents or links. No reformatting required.
• Policy Guide automatically extracts procurement pathways, spend thresholds, approval requirements, and category definitions.
• Eliminates manual rule-building from scratch, saving administrators significant setup time.
• Supports organizations with complex, multi-jurisdictional, or tiered procurement policies.

AI-assisted rule building with admin control

AI proposes the rules. Your team approves them. You stay in control.

• Beacon AI reads your policy and identifies the procurement methods and conditions it describes.
• Proposed rules are surfaced for administrator review before anything goes live.
• Your team can refine, adjust, or override any rule, keeping procurement expertise and organizational judgment in human hands.
• No black-box automation: every rule is visible, editable, and fully accountable.

Modular, maintainable rule engine

Policy changes shouldn't mean starting over.

• Procurement rules are structured as easy-to-use conditions — not hard-coded logic.
• When policy changes, administrators update the relevant rule without rebuilding the entire framework.
• Supports governance at scale across departments, campuses, or regions from a single interface.
• Reduces the ongoing administration burden of keeping guidance current, accurate and easy to access.

Secure by design

Your policy data remains yours.

• Complete data segregation between organizations: no data is shared across customer environments or to external LLMs.
• Your policy documents and buyer queries are never used to train external AI models.

How Unimarket Policy Guide – powered by Beacon AI works

1. Upload your procurement policy

Administrators upload procurement policy documents through Policy Guide's Smart Upload interface. Beacon AI reads the documents and automatically extracts pathways, spend thresholds, approval tiers, and category definitions.

2. Review and refine the rule set

Policy Guide – powered by Beacon AI proposes the procurement rules it has identified. Your team reviews the output, makes refinements if needed, and confirms the rule set before it goes live.

3. Buyers interact with Policy Guide in their workflow

End users access Policy Guide directly within the Unimarket platform. They describe what they need, respond to any clarifying questions, and receive a clear, policy-aligned recommendation, instantly.

4. Monitor usage and credit consumption

Administrators can track credit usage in real time to manage consumption and plan. Additional credits are available as your usage grows.

FAQs

• Which Unimarket packages include Policy Guide – powered by Beacon AI?

Policy Guide – powered by Beacon AI is an add-on available to customers on Source-to-Contract and Nova.

• Does Policy Guide use our data to train AI models?

No. Policy Guide – powered by Beacon AI operates with complete data segregation between organizations. Your policy documents and query data are never shared with other customers or used to train external AI models.

• How does Policy Guide handle policy updates?

Administrators can re-upload updated policy documents or modify individual rules at any time. The modular rule engine makes it straightforward to update specific conditions.

• What happens when credit balance is low?

Credit usage is tracked in real time and visible to administrators. When credits are running low, you can purchase additional credits to move into the next pack tier, ensuring no disruption to your buyers' experience.

• Can we control which staff have access to Policy Guide?

Yes. Policy Guide access is managed via role-based settings at the community level. Administrators can control which users can interact with Policy Guide, giving you full governance over the feature's rollout within your organization.