The future of work is inseparable from AI. For enterprise professionals, this means learning to work with AI tools in an iterative and exploratory manner. This approach leads to transparent, well-reasoned outputs that seamlessly integrate into broader business workflows.
In this walkthrough, you’ll take on the role of a spend analyst using the Corvic AI Agent. Your goal: improve understanding of vendor services across your enterprise by leveraging a structured classification system — the NAICS hierarchy — integrated into Corvic AI’s platform.
What is NAICS?
The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) organizes industries using a six-digit code:
- 1st–2nd digits: Economic sector
- 3rd digit: Subsector
- 4th digit: Industry group
- 5th digit: Specific industry
- 6th digit: National industry (with "0" often denoting no variation from U.S. definition)
This production-oriented structure enables consistent classification and analysis of economic activity. For this blog, we use the 2022 NAICS Manual , published here.
Analyzing spend information
Here’s a small sample of spend data from the last quarter — just enough to explore iteratively:
The following lines show spend. Columns are Vendor, category and $ value.
As an analyst, your job is to better understand the spends. For eg. what is the total spend on power generation? Later on, you will be asked to spread the power generation spend evenly by adding a new vendor.
We will use Corvic AI agent to do this task in a transparent and reasoned manner.
Analysis using the Corvic AI Agent
Ingestion and Quick Mode
As a first step, you will ingest the NAICS PDF directly into the Corvic AI platform and use the Quick Mode to create a Corvic AI agent. Follow the tutorial from the previous blog if needed.
Let’s Explore
In just a few minutes, we are now ready to explore our data!
As a first step, we need to understand the data. For each row, there seems to be a category for the vendor and cost associated. Let’s run the category by Corvic AI’s Agent.
Step 1: Solar Power - Initial Exploration
Query: Analyze Solar Power as per the NAICS hierarchy.
It looks like solar power is used widely and in different ways in the industry. Let’s try to narrow this down to power generation, your area of interest in this exploration.
Step 2: Zoom into Sector
Query: Analyze Solar Power as per the NAICS hierarchy in the context of power generation.
Nice! You have now confirmed that you are exploring the right industry neighborhood. You also have the NAICS industry code for Electric Power Generation sector (22111).
Query: What category does sector 22111 "Electric Power Generation" fall under?
Step 3: Broader Industry View
All right! We now know that we are in the utilities neighborhood. Let’s now zoom out to get the full utilities view. By exploring the hierarchy, we now have a better understanding of the neighborhood of the business of our vendors.
Query: Provide the full hierarchy of categories under "221 Utilities."
Task #1: Categorizing a new vendor
You are asked to add a new vendor, who distributes Natural gas, and also asked if we can spread the spend in a more even manner.
Let’s try to learn more about Natural Gas in the power industry.
Query: What sector does distributing Natural Gas belong to?
We confirmed that Natural gas distribution companies also generate, marketing, and distributing power.
We also know that Natural Gas distribution is part of the utilities hierarchy, just as Solar power is. We can get this confirmed.
Query: Does "Solar Power" belong to the same sector as "Natural Gas Distribution"?
We have now established that we can add the new vendor to the spends in the utilities section.
Task #2: Evening out the Spend
You have gained knowledge that Natural Gas is part of Power generation spend. You can now leverage the information we collected with Corvic AI, and frame the spend information provided in a more standardized manner. You can ask the Corvic agent to even out the spend within an existing group of vendors who generate power.
Note: We have taken a simple calculation here for example purposes. Corvic AI Agents can do complex optimization tasks.
Query: A new vendor, selling power using Natural Gas Distribution (NAICS code 221210), is available. Spend is at $0. What is the total spend on power generation? Can you tell me how I can evenly divide the spend on power generation amongst the relevant vendors?
Corvic AI made a traceable calculation and provided an option to even out the spend.
Note: The calculation left out Goat farming from the spend distribution as we are focusing on power generation. The framing of the context in terms of a standard vocabulary (NAICS) helped the agent to understand the question correctly and provide a meaningful and correct response.
Completing the Workflow
You’ve completed your analysis and left an auditable trace in Corvic AI. Any team member can now review, validate, or build upon your work — enabling true collaborative intelligence in the enterprise.
Summary
In this walkthrough, you used Corvic AI to interact with the NAICS hierarchy, a standardized system for classifying business activity. Through transparent, reasoned analysis, you:
- Explored category mappings
- Categorized a new vendor
- Redistributed spend across vendors
- Maintained an auditable workflow
This is how enterprise teams can work with AI — not as a black box, but as a collaborative, explainable system for decision-making.
Learn more at corvic.ai.
