Globality hosted a Breakfast discussion to kick off DPW’s first NYC event with 20 CPOs and other senior procurement leaders invited to join our CCO Keith Hausmann and HFS Research’s Chief Research Officer Tony Filippone (himself a former CPO) to explore how autonomous sourcing can enable businesses to increase sourcing efficiencies, reducing costs and improving speed-to-market.

What is Autonomous Sourcing?
Introducing the topic, Keith Hausmann revealed a couple of definitions of autonomous sourcing from different sources. McKinsey defines it as: “Deploying fully autonomous sourcing bots to drive procurement in standardized spend areas, thereby freeing up buyer time for more value-additive activities.”

And Chat GPT’s reply when asked is: “Autonomous sourcing leverages advanced technologies to make the procurement process more efficient, cost-effective, and strategic, reducing the reliance on manual processes.”

The Case for Autonomous Sourcing
Tony Filippone then shared some insights and findings from HFS’ recent research into the opportunities for procurement around AI and gen AI. The top priority for sourcing leaders was still reducing costs – some 79% of procurement leaders identified as one of their top three priorities, well ahead of ensuring compliance and process adherence (45%) and managing risk (41%).

Emphazing that the ‘Generative Era’ is not only about doing more with less but also generating actionable business value, he outlined the opportunity for forward-thinking procurement executives to seize the initiative and use new AI-powered technology to dramatically increase the number of projects they manage while improving processes to deliver 20% cost savings, lower risk and 5x increased speed-to-market, all with faster and better spend analytics.

“Imagine an AI-fuelled world that provides freedom within fences,” was his rallying call to the group.

Peer Insights and Perspectives
CPOs from Fortune 500 companies across industries including financial services, consumer goods, pharma and healthcare, retail and travel then shared their perspectives on where they sat on the autonomous sourcing journey and how it could improve the productivity and performance of their teams.

A procurement leader from a multi-billion-dollar food and beverage organization stated that autonomous sourcing is a must to improve productivity across the function and that indirect spend in particular is ripe for its adoption. This was echoed by another leading beverage company whose CPO agreed that there is no question autonomous sourcing is the future for procurement.

The CPO of a top US-based operator in the travel industry said that there was a strong business case for autonomous sourcing to increase efficiencies, and quickly and easily identify the right supplier for every buying need, while his counterpart at a recent pharma spin-off added that this new operating model was on his roadmap to optimize all spend from large strategic purchases to smaller, high-volume tail spend.

Act Now or Fall Behind
The CPO of a financial services firm that recently adopted Globality’s autonomous sourcing platform stated unequivocally that all companies should start with this new operating model today and stop hesitating. He said that category managers across his team had embraced autonomous sourcing and were deploying to business stakeholders for self-service because of the value of speed. What had previously taken 3-6 months to get to market across his organization was now down to weeks, days or, even in some cases, hours.

The discussion highlighted the growing interest in AI-driven autonomous sourcing and helped define the key benefits of this new technology to G2000 companies, underscoring how the increased efficiencies and productivity will help drive wider business value amidst the continuing uncertain macro-economic circumstances.

Contact us for a demo of Globality’s autonomous sourcing platform – winner of Best Technology Provider at the World Procurement Awards – to see how it uses cutting-edge AI, built from the ground up, to deliver 70% efficiencies and 10-20% cost savings instantly.