For years, companies have bought from Amazon Business through their procurement systems. Approval workflows and cost center allocations stayed in place, so procurement kept control of the spend. The buying experience was weaker. Requesters either had limited search inside their own system, or they had to punchout to the Amazon Business store, build a cart there and bring it back.
At Amazon Business Reshape in Nashville, we announced a partnership that transforms the entire user experience. We bring Amazon Business’s AI-powered procurement experience directly into our product.
Amazon Business described the goal of the launch in its own announcement:
“Bringing Amazon Business’s AI-powered end-to-end procurement experience into the e-procurement systems customers use to manage spend across their organizations enables them to quickly and easily find and buy the products they want from Amazon Business, so they can focus on driving toward their next stage of growth.”
Shelley Salomon, worldwide vice president of Amazon Business, in Amazon’s announcement
What changes for requesters
Requesters stay in Lio from the first search to the finished order. Amazon Business products appear in Guided Buying next to all other catalogs a customer uses.
To make the suggestions fit, Lio securely shares relevant context with Amazon Business: purchasing policies, budgets, order history and what the requester is looking for. Amazon Business uses that context to return product recommendations tailored to the company. Lio keeps applying your rules on top. Contracted suppliers and negotiated terms remain the preferred buying path, while Amazon Business’s broad assortment covers the long-tail needs that dedicated supplier catalogs don’t reach.
Example: restocking the breakroom in three offices
A facilities team needs to refill breakroom supplies for three locations. The buyer describes the need in Lio in plain language. Lio returns a curated selection from Amazon Business with prices, availability, delivery estimates and volume discounts.
From there the buyer can keep asking, for example “Which of these did we order last time?” or “Is there a larger pack with a better unit price?” Once the cart is right, the order goes through the approval flow the company already uses in Lio. The buyer never has to open another store or move a cart between systems.
Security and data governance
Our partnership with Amazon Business is backed by contractual terms. Before any data is exchanged, Lio and Amazon Business agree on which data is shared, which procurement policies are enforced and how purchasing guidelines apply.
Customers decide what their requesters can see and buy. Every purchase follows the guardrails the organization has already set up in Lio.
Working on a common standard: UCP for B2B procurement
The way procurement systems connect to suppliers has barely changed in 25 years. OCI arrived in 1998, cXML a year later, and most supplier integrations still run on them. Every connection is built separately, which slows down supplier onboarding and limits what AI agents can do across suppliers.
Amazon Business is working with us and further including SAP to lead the charta for a new Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) domain for B2B procurement. The proposal describes one open, shared model for buying from suppliers through AI systems, covering requisitions, approvals, purchase orders, invoices and reconciliation. Instead of each integration modeling business identity, pricing and policies on its own, participants connect once and reach many counterparties.
Lio has joined the UCP B2B Procurement Tech Council as a development partner, and we bring use cases from our customers’ daily purchasing into that work. Supplier onboarding is one of them: with a shared standard, a supplier is connected once and agents discover what it offers on their own, which could cut technical integration time from weeks to minutes. Carts are another. Today, changing a quantity often means restarting the whole PunchOut session. With UCP, an agent can update the cart directly. Order follow-ups could also run without manual back-and-forth. At one large supplier, that covers more than 20,000 order status requests a month.
“Our customers want their teams to buy on contract and without detours. With Amazon Business inside Lio, requesters find what they need in one place, and procurement keeps every rule in force. Working on UCP together with Amazon Business is the next step: one agentic standard instead of a separate integration for every supplier.”
Patrick Hasse, Lio
Availability
The Amazon Business features described here are currently available to Amazon Business customers in the United States and may not be offered in other regions. Availability is subject to change.
