Transcript 0:00 So what do you call a procurement team who has a very high adoption of every module in their source-to-pay suite? Liars. [instrumental music] Computers have lots of memory, but no imagination. 0:12 Man is a slow, sloppy, and brilliant thinker. Machines, on the other hand, are fast, accurate, and stupid. AI will do what you tell it to do, but that may be very different from what you had in mind. 0:24 Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things, and there never is. Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. 0:33 For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve our quality of life, please press three. [upbeat music] Hey guys, we're finally here, which is great. So excited to be here. 0:44 But before we do anything, I wanna sh- tell you about why this show came about, what purpose does it serve. 0:49 So if you've been scroll- scrolling through your podcast feed, you stumbled on this show, and you're wondering if it's worth your time, here's why it is, right? 0:57 So you're a procurement leader, you're trying to make sense of procurement technology, or procure tech in the vernacular. 1:02 You're trying to make sense of that landscape and, and how to pick solutions and couple them together. That's when you should stick around, right? 1:09 We'll tell you what works, what doesn't, where to put your money as you navigate this space. And I'm joined by my co-host, Matthew Buckingham. So happy to have you. Hey, good to be here. Thank you. 1:22 And would you tell folks, like, why you're here with me, right? Like, uh, why we're having these conversations, and, and, uh, who you are, what your background is. Yeah. So like you say, Matthew Buckingham. 1:33 Um, I'm based out of Atlanta, and, uh, I've been in and around the procurement technology space for roughly 25 years now. It's been a long, long time. 1:42 Um, and before that I had a real job, um, where I was actually buying and selling stuff, and that's been across the world. 1:48 I, you know, I had 10 years with SAP, I had five years with Cooper, I had a, a couple of years with Archestra, and now I'm with a company called FocalPoint. 1:56 And I, I keep going along with the updated, um, technology and, and I really want to kill those myths about what's going on out there, but also educate and, and hopefully help people to learn what other things are available and, and what can be done with technology. 2:13 Yeah, that's awesome, man. And I feel it, it pairs so well with my background, right? When we, we get, like, a trifecta. 2:18 We're only two people, but you said you worked in procurement and in software, and I come at it from a consulting background. So I'm Joël Connemelas. 2:25 I've been, for the past 15 years, also in the procure tech space, but from implementing, uh, systems. 2:31 So I'm the person organizations call when they need to figure out what to buy, how to implement it, and then how to fix stuff when inevitably, you know, things break or projects go sideways. 2:42 Uh, I've often said I'm like the, you know, I have an assassin business model on the consulting front. 2:46 Uh, and so I've worked across, you know, ma- much of the major platforms that you mentioned, the others as well, in over 11 industries. 2:54 Uh, and I've seen the same mistakes repeated over and over again, like, in different, different variants, right? And so I started the Pre-Procurement Newsletter to, to help fix that as well. 3:04 We're trying to put that, those lesson learns out, uh, out there, and I think that's why, you know, when we got together, Matt, we said, "Hey, let's do this show as well," right? Give, give people- Absolutely... 3:12 another format to consume this type of information. Um, and so yeah, really, really happy that we're, we're teaming up on this. Yeah, I'm really, really excited to, to really get started and get digging into it. 3:24 Let's go. Yeah. And so for folks who are listening, we've got two show formats. This one where Matthew and I are gonna go deep into different topics. 3:33 We're gonna start with, uh, analyzing market trends, market signals, things that we're seeing, either generically in the technology space that apply to procurement or procurement-specific stuff that's happening. 3:45 And then in between those monthly shows, uh, the deep dive shows will have weekly newsletter takeaways where the, the newsletter I was just discussing, like, either you consume it and we go deeper into, you know, what, what you just read and/or, you know, you don't consume the newsletter. 4:00 You don't like getting emails, uh, clogging up your inbox, and you'd rather do a, a, a, um, sound format, right, or podcast format. So that, that'll be, uh, how we do this. 4:10 And as we wrap up, we're gonna try to get this to you on a weekly basis. So I hope you'll join us on this journey. 4:16 Subscribe now if, uh, if you haven't, right, and we've convinced you that there's value here, and then we'll get straight into the show. [upbeat music] Yeah. 4:26 So one, one thing I've been reading about, and actually it literally happened just, just the other day, um, was around SAP. SAP continues to be the David Bowie of, of software, right? They keep reinventing themselves. 4:39 I worked for them for 10 years, um, when they were all on-prem and everything. Now they're the AI company, which is really cool and really interesting, but what does that really mean? 4:50 What I, what I'm hearing from Christian Klein was talking, the CEO, he's... He said, "We're getting to the place where agents run the business, and you can focus on what truly matters." 5:01 Kind of worries me a little 'cause the business probably truly matters. But he's saying that with AI, the value is remaining elusive, and this is something I completely agree with him about. You've got 5:13 all of that data in, in SAP, and you've got all of these agents that are not in SAP and not using SAP. So how are they getting their context? 5:22 And this is something that, that we've been thinking about a lot recently and, and hopefully we've been solving for. 5:28 But the idea of what they're coming up with is, you know, if you have all of the data in one place and you've got the agents reading from that data, then they're gonna make better decisions. 5:39 I still think you need to have human in the loop at this stage, though- Mm-hmm... personally. But that, that's their idea. 5:46 Then you get to the question of, okay, but what if I don't want to have my agents in, in SAP or built on SAP? How do I get that data? 5:55 That's the other thing that SAP is talking about now, and they're kind of contradicting themselves a little bit. 6:00 You've got their A- API policy, which is what can I drag out, and they're only gonna l- allow SAP-endorsed APISo that's a lack of innovation for me. 6:11 If, if we only endorse the companies that we like to access the data that is belonging to the customer, um, is this really where we wanna get to? I don't know. 6:22 Um, so yeah, they've, they've got so far 224 agents and 51 assistants and all this kind of stuff, but I'm not sure. You know, SAP has done this. I worked for them for 10 years. 6:36 They're very good at talking the talk and, and coming up with great ideas. Execution, eh, sometimes can be a little lacking. Always, in fact. Yeah. 6:45 And, and it's so fitting, I think, that, you know, you kick us off in, in, in the series with a first story on SAP 'cause it's, you know, in, in the past I've also... 6:54 You know, you s- it's funny you said David Bowie because my m- my mind went immediately to the David and Goliath story, right? And thinking of them as- [laughs]... as Goliath in the, in the procure tech software space. 7:04 Uh, you know, with the Ariba acquisition in 2012 and, and everything that they've done since then and, and then being a, a market leader from at least an install standpoint, right? And so it's, it's... 7:15 I, I always look to SAP as well for like, okay, what-- where are they going? And then how does everybody else respond? 7:21 And, uh, from what we've seen in the past couple weeks to, to that API, updated API policy that you referenced, like people are, people are worried, right? 7:30 That they're not gonna be able to, with their solutions, like help SAP clients make sense of their data and/or layer on additional AI-based capabilities. 7:40 And, and I think that's the story to follow in these next couple months and years, right? 7:44 Is like which enterprise clients that run on SAP are, are, um, in tune enough with, you know, these, these, uh, policies to negotiate their way, uh, out of them and/or to negotiate, you know, having their partners or their solutions that are non-SAP become SAP endorsed, as you mentioned, right? 8:06 Do you see that as being like the main, you know, the main thing people are gonna wrestle with in this, given this? Yeah. I think for procurement practitioners in two ways, right? 8:14 So th- this first, as a procurement person buying a solution from SAP, um, and continuing to buy it, how do I negotiate that into my contract? Most people don't have that much leverage with, with SAP when it comes to it. 8:28 And, you know, there's companies can help you with that, but, but really you don't have that much leverage to be able to negotiate that. 8:35 But then as the practitioner and actually running your processes through a solution and wanting to have that full context, but also have that workflow at the same time, 8:45 you know, if you're relying on SAP to define your workflows and to give you access to the, to the data, that's gonna be a problem, um, because you, you know, you're, you're gonna be beholden to SAP and/or their partners to set that up for you. 9:02 I think, you know, the, the solutions that are out there around orchestration that we'll talk about later, um, have addressed that to some extent, but most of them remain with generic AI that is not contextual. 9:14 It's not taking the context of who you are as a company into account. Mm. Some of them do, for example. 9:22 But, you know, it's, it's how you, how you use the data correctly, how you have the right agents in place, but also how you make those agents work together as well is very, very important, and how you keep humans in the loop as well as you go through. 9:38 So I think SAP, yeah, great idea. Don't see it happening. Yeah. And, and, and the... Yeah. That's the takeaway for me, right? 9:46 Is like there's, I think there's, there's this book from Kevin Kelly, who was the old, uh, editor of, in chief of Wired Magazine, where he talks about like 11 inevitable forces in technology, like in the next decades, and one of them is like openness or accessibility of data, right? 10:03 And I think we're gonna see, like in- inevitably we're trending towards that. But, you know, this story that you're bringing up to me is an illustration of like, you know, 10:13 what technology can do and then what you get as, you know, business rules and/or contractual clauses that get in the way of that, right? 10:21 And so for procurement professionals who are thinking about their tech stack in collaboration with IT, to me, it's all about like making sure you understand the dynamics at play here, and then you're looking out for contract clauses and, and trying to make sure that they don't come to hinder your ability to deliver on the benefits you're looking for from, from the art of the possible in tech. 10:41 Yeah. Absolutely. Which is a great lead into the second story we, we wanted to cover today, which is an older one. 10:47 Uh, but given it's our first show, I wanted to bring it up, which is the, uh, Deloitte ca- Deloitte came out with a really fascinating report on AI adoption in the enterprise in January this year, 2026, where they surveyed 3,235, uh, director and above, uh, stakeholders in enterprise globally across 24 countries, right? 11:10 And it, it's funny, right? We hadn't spoken about our stories that much before coming on the show, but the same types of things come up, right? Where why, why are the... 11:20 So the, the headline is that risk management, governance models, and then, uh, talent are the three biggest things that are slowing down AI adoption in the enterprise, like in big business. 11:32 And, uh, I pulled out a couple stats from the reports just to help illustrate. 11:35 So 77% of companies, uh, said that the location of AI development, so where their AI provider, whe- whether it's LLM or not, right, is a key factor when selecting tech. And so risk management, right? 11:49 That's a big, uh, the biggest, uh, lever in risk management is like, where, where is this technology situated? 11:54 And then what's the legislation, uh, either protecting my data and/or, you know, am I, is it complying with my regulatory framework? 12:04 And so, you know, when you look at the most concerning risks, which is that second piece is data, data privacy and security for 73% of res- respondents, legal IP and regulatory compliance for 50%, governance capabilities and oversights of the, of the tech I'm, I'm buying for 46%, and then only the fourth one, right, is model quality, consistency, and explainability.46%, but still in that, you know, governance and risk management area of, of risk man- of, of, uh, why people can't adopt, right? 12:35 Or are f- are not adopting to the level that they could be given the art of the possible and the really cool stuff we're seeing, you know, from, from folks who build in a bubble, I'll call it, right? 12:44 Like single player at home, what you're doing with, with Claude. Uh, and so everybody that, that i- in this survey, only 84... 12:53 So 84% of companies that were surveyed have not redesigned any of their job roles around AI capabilities, right? And that- that's probably, let's say, and before 13:04 Deloitte published it in January, so let's say end of last year, Q4 2025, right? It was only 20 some odd percent, or not even 20% of companies that have started redesigning roles for AI, right? 13:16 So I, I, I thought this was a really impactful report because it says, "Hey, the, you, you know, ChatGPT moment was in October 2022." That's right. 13:25 We're, we're three and a half years later, and like, you don't need to have FOMO, right? 13:29 Like, people are still very deliberately, uh, holding off on AI investments for, for these major, uh, risk governance and talent issues, right? So I don't know if... What your initial reactions are to that, Matt. 13:42 Yeah, my, my thoughts on it, there, there's a couple of things. I, I think people still need to understand what they want to use AI for, and I think that, for me, is a big restrictive thing. 13:52 I, I mean, companies are saying, "You have to adopt AI, you have to adopt AI," but why? If it's just to save money or if it's just to do things more quickly, um, I think we're missing a trick. Mm. 14:03 I think the, the, the trick is how do we do business better? 14:07 You know, how do we enable our people to, to actually have the information and do a, a better job of what they're doing, not just do it more quickly or get rid of them, um, which is the main drive of AI at the moment. 14:20 I think the, the second one, my second worry on this one is, you know, we talk about privacy and everything. Those lines are gonna get more and more blurred, I believe, as time goes on. 14:30 It's gonna be more and more difficult to keep data private, um, as AI gets more involved and people are, um, are less stringent with how they use AI. You know, how do you use AI personally at the moment? 14:44 You, you only get an 80% effectivity rate, but you're throwing documents in there. You're asking it things that possibly you wouldn't even ask your mother. Yeah. 14:53 [laughs] Um, and, and I mean, that, that whole privacy thing is gonna become so much looser. It became loose, much more loose with social media already, which is why I'm on, not, not on Facebook or Instagram. 15:06 But it's gonna get more and more loose, I think this whole privacy and the expectation of privacy, and, and the difference between business privacy and personal privacy will become wider. 15:16 I don't know where it's gonna go, um, but I do know that data is gonna get out there that has not got out there before, and it's become, gonna become more and more accessible. 15:27 It's kind of like copyright all over again or intellectual property- Yeah... right? 15:31 And it speaks to, I think it links both our stories together, which is like that data is your competitive advantage, is your moat, right? 15:38 Is where a lot of the value will reside, um, if, if everything else becomes commoditized over time, right? 15:45 Uh, I think we're he- we're heading there inevitably, right, to link it back to Kevin Kelly's book, but, um, but we're not there yet, right? And so, um, but I, I love the, the takeaway, right? 15:55 And the last thing I'd, I'd end with on this story is, you know, as a complementary research, what I found when I was looking up, like, I was like, "Okay, well, if this is a, if this, if governance and like model location, uh, physical location of the companies, right, is a, an impediment to adoption," like what's happening, right, in terms of LLM models or AI models? 16:16 And what I saw is like what I s- I term the, the LLM army is awakening, right? So there's more and more of these providers, uh, that are popping up in France, in the UK, in Canada, in South Korea, in, in the UAE. 16:30 Uh, and so I could fi- find 100 and din- 105 different LLM models across 15 countries when I looked, uh, and, and other models as well, like text-to-speech, image e- image editing, text-to-video. 16:43 And so we're really starting to see the democratization of these, these AI capabilities, right? And so I think that's gonna start to break down those, uh, those impediments to adoption that I mentioned earlier. 16:57 But to your point, then it becomes like, okay, well, what, you know, how do we ensure that data remains ours and that our IP re- re- remains ours? 17:06 Uh, and I think that's the, that's the biggest question that folks that don't have an, a sufficiently satisfactory answer to yet are not adopting AI, right? 17:15 I think it's almost an extension of what we saw in the procurement technology space. So 2015, I think it was you who told me this, I don't know, but there were 20 procurement technologies in 2015 that you could buy. 17:27 By 2024, there were 400 technologies you could buy. I think it just confuses people. That, that's the problem. 17:36 Once you, you start having that, and then, then you have data in your silos, and it becomes more and more difficult for AI to, to actually find what data it needs and actually work on, like I say, contextual data. Yeah. 17:49 And that's, that's the critical thing with, with all of this AI. So if you bring in 20, 20 different of those 105 LLMs to do different things for you, you're gonna have to train them all- Yeah... to do stuff. 18:01 I'm not saying major on ChatGPT or Claude, although I do use both of those myself. Um, but I, uh, I am saying, you know, let's, let's be careful and actually have a real 18:15 clear objective of how we want to use AI going forward, and what we want to achieve by it is so critical. Yeah. You know, it's... I'm not saying do a waterfall project either. 18:27 I'm, I'm saying, you know, it needs to be innovative. It needs to be, um, Scrum kind of technology. But yeah.But and- Be careful... I w- maybe we can end there, right? 18:36 'Cause when you said that the first time, I was going like, it's like saying like, "You must use lawnmower." I'm like, "Yeah, I don't even have a lawn." Like, what's [laughs]... Right? Like- That's right. [laughs]... 18:45 what are you gonna use it for, right? So, uh- That's right... and that's a good segue also into our deep dive section where we wanna cover, uh, my meta-analysis pr- of procure tech press releases. 18:55 So, I think directionally the numbers you said were right, right? 18:58 Like, we're just, we have this exponential, uh, offering of procure tech solutions on the market, and so I wanna give you a little tip in the next section around how to navigate that a bit simply, or a bit more simply. 19:12 Cool. Let's do it. [upbeat music] All right, so for today's deep dive, w- so I've been looking and collecting procure tech market press, uh, releases, uh, over the last five, six years, right? 19:27 And I did a meta-analysis where I started looking at, uh, who's announcing what, when, and what kind of signals can we, can we glean from that, right? 19:37 So I'll, I'll start off by saying press releases are marketing documents, right? And so, just because a vendor says something doesn't mean they can do it or that they have, you know, the capabilities to back it up. 19:47 Uh, but with that caveat, I think we could still pull out some interesting info here from, uh, from the press releases that have been coming out of the procure tech market for the last couple years. 19:57 So the first thing is that, you know, these, what I'll call old guard providers, right? So I think there's two separate groups, right? 20:02 There's the old- the older solutions, um, so GEP, Ariba, Ivalua, Coupa, Jaggaer, right? The, the solutions that you've seen on like the Gartner Magic Quadrants, uh, for, for years. 20:15 So they all started around, you know, mid-2024 to the end of 2025 to announce intake and orchestration modules or functionality, right? What is intake and orchestration? It's, 20:28 uh, the functionality that you would need to have a, a digital front door to have all your requesters come into one place and get int- their intake, kinda like the triage area of an emergency room, right? 20:40 Where everybody comes with what they need, what their purchasing intent is, and then you can then use orchestration to route them to the correct processes in the back end, whether that's sourcing, whether it's a catalog, whether it's straight to req, whether it's straight to non-PO invoice or P-card, right? 20:55 You're able to, depending on your category strategy, your spend category strategy, determine how you're gonna, uh, manage traffic, so to speak, and then have visibility end-to-end across what is happening for each of those requests in their various different life cycles. 21:12 So the old guard didn't have this functionality or had it before, but it wasn't front and center and was feeling that, you know, there was new entrants in the market proposing this stuff and that they had to start, uh, defending that, that ground, so to speak, right? 21:26 And so I can-- I can't say anything around the quality of each of these providers' intake and orchestration, but I want us to take that signal of within a year, they all released an intake [laughs] and orchestration module, right? 21:39 [laughs] So that's the takeaway here. Then the second piece is why were they doing that? So intake and orchestration providers as another soft- uh, separate software category. 21:50 You know, we'd have-- we have Focal Point in there, Zip, Vertice, Pivot, uh, Oracle Labs. Like there's, I wanna say a dozen, a dozen valid, uh, providers in that software category. 22:01 What I've seen since 2023 all the way up to, you know, a couple months ago, a couple weeks ago, is, uh, these providers coming out with, with functionality that mirrors the modules that sourcing provide or source-to-pay suite providers has, have put out there over the years, right? 22:18 So a sourcing module or sourcing capability or contracting capability or procure-to-pay capability, supplier relationship management capability. 22:27 And so, you know, I have a, a, a chart where I think I have like, yeah, I wanna say there's, uh, you know, a good, a good solid 30 press releases, uh, over the past four years where we're seeing all of these things pop up in each of the offerings. 22:42 And they're all, uh, they've got various, I'll call it completeness, uh, of, of the end-to-end procurement cycle. 22:49 Um, but what that gives me as a signal is that everybody's trying to build out, you know, their, their functionalities to be able to be measured against suites. 22:57 And Matt, Matt, like that-- this is me, you know, not having, uh, spoken to you about this before, before we do the podcast, but like what's your take, right? 23:05 Does that, does that resonate with what you see being one of those software providers? 23:11 It does, and, uh, you know, I, yeah, we're one of those software providers, and w- we've built out solution as, as we've gone, as, as our customers have demanded it. Um, so yeah, we've added an SRM solution. 23:22 We've added a TPRM solution, et cetera. You know, it's analogous with what happened, Ariba was launched in 1996, I believe, um, acquired by SAP in about 2011 or something. 23:35 Coupa came along in 2009, and it said, "We're not gonna be Ariba." Mm. You know, kinda they are now. Um, it's got to the point where Ivalua, 23:46 Coupa, GEP, like you say, have turned into the thing that they were trying not to be. Um, I, I believe with, with a lot of the intake orchestration solutions, that's becoming the fact as well. 23:59 You know, I, we're, we're saying we're not gonna ever buil- build payments. You know, accounts payable is not gonna be something we do. But if I look back at, at Basware, they started as payments. 24:10 They went into P2P, and then they've kinda backed out again now. Um, you know, I think people say things, and then you get caught up in your, your customer demands and customer needs as you move forward. 24:24 Is it easier to build code now? Yes, it is. Um, you know, we talked about AI before, but AI enables you to build code more quickly, more efficiently, more effectively possibly. 24:36 But-Do we just want to be replicating what the previous generation does, just doing it faster? I, I would say no. We should be reinventing as we go. 24:47 We should be building business value into what we're doing, not just building business replication into what we're doing. 24:54 And I, I hope that's what we're doing, and I really feel we are, but Yeah, it's a, it's an interesting point, right? 24:59 Like, not just on the newest tech stack without the tech dec- uh, tech debt, but the same business processes, but rather rethinking it and, and rethinking the function at the same time, right? 25:10 Interesting perspective, right? 25:12 But, um, and one, one of the things that I'll add, right, is like, as I'm looking at this meta-analysis, I'm going, a lot of people have come to me with the question like, "Hey, should I buy a source-to-pay suite or should I buy an intake and orchestration platform?" 25:24 Right? And, uh, I think that's the wrong question. I think that question's dead now because of what we just discussed is, 25:31 you know, you can measure these providers, uh, one against the other directly because they're all telling you that you can, right? 25:38 That they, they offer you the same business capabilities, maybe in different ways with a different tech stack, right? Uh, with different data assets as well, to like get back to what we were saying earlier. 25:49 Uh, so they all have various different value props, uh, potentially for different industries as well, whereas, you know, the, the purchasing process is, uh, there's more specificity to it. 25:59 Uh, you know, we think about that old direct versus indirect, uh, dynamic as well, right? 26:03 And so my message is, you know, you can now start flipping the question around and saying, "Here's what we want to achieve as business capabilities," instead of, "Here's what technology type we're looking for." Mm-hmm. 26:16 And then you can look at all these different software, uh, providers that want to be your end-to-end platform in the same, in the same way, right? 26:24 Measuring them against the capabilities of spend analysis and sourcing and contract management and category management and P2P and SRM, right? 26:33 And then what that enables to you, you to do as well is to potentially bring in best-of-breed providers where you know that, you know, a sub-process of procurement is really, really valuable to you based on your category structure, right? 26:46 And then you're able to have a complete picture, apples to apples, between source to pay suites, how do they all perform on, on sourcing versus intake and orchestration, and then versus a best-of-breed provider that may only perform in that one box, right? 26:58 Or in that one subcategory of procurement. And then you get that entire picture, uh, once and for all at the same time, right? 27:06 And so I don't know if you've seen many of th- RFPs being run that way, Matthew, but like I, I know I've run a couple with clients and that shaping them- Mm-hmm... 27:14 in that way, and it's brought like massive clarity very quickly. Yeah. I've, I've literally got five RFPs on my desk at the moment that I'm working on, um, that, uh, it's running the gambit. 27:27 One of them is an all-inclusive, uh, obviously be- been written partly by, by one of the big providers, um, the original providers and, and asking for specific, um, functionality that only they can provide. 27:41 Um, and the other one is, is challenging. It's, it's saying, you know, "What is your function in each of these different places?" 27:49 And when I speak to the people at that particular company, they're, they're very much telling me, "Yeah, we're looking at best of breed. 27:55 We're looking to get the best possible solution for the most important parts of the business." Yeah. Now, for them, 28:02 they, they've broken intake out completely from orchestration, which I think is correct because orchestration is the, the kind of critical thing of, of doing it. Intake is, ah, it's basically form filling, right? 28:14 It's glorified and it's got AI on the front end to help you fill the form, but it's form filling. So yeah, break it out. If you can do that in Jira good enough for yourself, fine, just do it that way. 28:24 Or if the Coupa solution is good enough, just do it with the Coupa solution. But the orchestration is how you hold all this stuff together, and if you're looking at, 28:34 at real best of breed and the best way to do this, you've got to do best of breed without creating silos. Hmm. That's what you need. So that's why you need something to tie it all together. 28:45 And then you want to plug your AI agents into that, and they become part of that as well as you go through. So yeah, they've done it the right way, I think. 28:54 It's gonna be really hard for us to complete the RFP, but that's fine. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. At-- But because at the same time, as a software provider, like you need to think, "Okay, what industry are they in? 29:04 Like, what are their corporate objectives? Like, what's their spend profile? Where are gonna be, where are gonna be the big nuts in terms of value for them," right? 29:10 "And then how do we present our solution in a, in a way that, uh, shows them where we have-" Yeah... the capabilities to enable that?" Right? And so, yeah, t- I, I admire your, uh... 29:21 That's a difficult exercise to do, but I admire that, you know, you respect that that's the right way to do it, right? Um- Yeah. One of, one of the questions very much was, you know, what's your minimum viable product? 29:32 Because y- at that point you have to buy... It's eating the elephant. You have to, have to eat it in pieces. You can't do it all at once. No, that's right. And I-- If... 29:42 This is a topic for another show because we have to wrap up the deep dive section. Yeah. 29:46 But yeah, digital transformation as a muscle or as a practice instead of as a project or a program that has a start and an end, right? 29:53 I think, you know, given the speed at which technology evolves these days as well, maybe that's where we, where we give our final takeaways. 30:01 Like you need to have a framework of reference for what are the capabilities, technological capabilities that you're wanting to enable to reach your business objectives, and then that you're continuously hacking at those away with, with a partner or a set of partners that's gonna help you enable that, right? 30:17 Based on culture, based on their policies, based on how they handle data, et cetera. And, and, uh- Yep... and you'll, you'll eventually get there, right? 30:25 I think we overestimate what we can do in a year, and we underestimate what we can do in five years, um, in terms of transformation. Very, very true. Yeah. That's an old adage, but it's true. [chuckles] Well, yeah. 30:38 And it's, uh, at the org level, it's also, you know, those productivity books where you say one as an individual, I think that's the old cliché, but it's like, how do we think about how do we do that in the enterprise organization setting? 30:51 Um, so yeah, let's leave it as a, a fishtail ending here for this deep dive. Some hook to grab onto.All right, let's move on to rapid fire. [upbeat music] Yeah. So what we wanna do now is the rapid fire. 31:06 For, for rapid fire, what we're gonna do is we're gonna throw a phrase or a word at, uh, at the other person, and they're gonna come back with an answer, an answer within, like, five seconds of, of why they think it's rated overrated or underrated. 31:23 I, I can kick off. Yep. Okay. So Joel, supplier portals. I think supplier portals are overrated because you still have to log into them, or at least most of supplier portals. What about you and, uh, what about AI agents? 31:39 I think they're overrated in the current form. We've talked about this a bit. I think without context, AI agents become just robots. Best of breed versus integrated business or suites. 31:52 Yeah, I think that's a debate, you know, it always comes back around, and I think it's overrated in the sense where the debate is well documented, the trade-offs are known depending on what you, uh, what you wanna get out of, uh, your technology platform and/or best of breed solutions, and the answer is always hybrid. 32:08 So I think it's overrated. Uh, what about no-code/low-code procurement workflow builders, Matt? Oh, that's a good one. I think it's underrated by traditionalists. It, it's a real thing. 32:18 Um, but over-hyped by vendors at the same time. You know, you, you really need to be moving forward and having... It's a dream at the moment. It rarely materializes, honestly- Mm... in most companies. 32:30 What about business process management? Is that overrated? 32:33 I think that's underrated, and people who follow my stuff will know, [laughs] will know I think that, uh, because I find, like, you know, to our earlier conversations today, if you take the time to determine what your objectives are and how the business process will serve that objective, and then you enable it with technology, that's the unlock. 32:51 Um, Matt, what about intake and orchestration? Oh, that's one of my favorites. Um, completely overrated as a standalone category. 33:00 I think it's underrated as an architectural principle if you take away the intake part of it, the, the whole orchestration area. What about supplier relationship management? 33:11 I think that's underrated as well because most procurement teams will start with their spend cube, like they know they need to have a vision, a, a view on spend to be effective, but I think you also need SRM capabilities to be able to be effective in terms of linking everything together, getting the compliance of, of, uh, your suppliers, minimizing risk. 33:31 Like, a lot of things go through SRM, but it's such a hard thing to put in place because there's so many stakeholders, that often it just remains a pipe dream. Uh, internal training programs. 33:43 I think they're massively underrated. Um, you know, the Deloitte data backs this as well, that we spoke about earlier. 33:50 You know, you have to have governance, you have to have talent, you have to have the reduction in the IS bottlenecks. 33:56 And, and to do that, you have to have, you have to have training programs internally, and YouTube is not a substitute. What about reverse auctions? 34:05 Well, reverse auctions I think are properly rated in the sense where it's a tool in the tool belt. 34:09 Uh, uh, unfortunately, a lot of people have not experimented with that tool, which I think is why there, there's a, an interest that keeps coming back for auctions. Uh, they can be used for certain things, right? 34:20 But you shouldn't blanket use them, and you should be strategic about when, when you use them. And finally, procurement's obsession with becoming strategic. [laughs] This is a great one. Overrated as a goal generally. 34:35 Um, it's used to avoid doing operations well sometimes, I think. But honestly, it's underrated as an outcome. We... If we had strategy that we actually worked to, it would be fantastic. 34:49 But most people have it, put it in a drawer, leave it for six months, and then look at it maybe and say, "Did we achieve?" Yeah, I think it's a, it's a byproduct, right? Like, it's a- Mm-hmm... 34:58 byproduct of how you carry yourself as a, as a team throughout your organization. So that's our first rapid fire. Ding, ding, ding. [laughs] Good job. 35:07 [laughs] And, and at the same time, we're coming up to the end of the episode here, so that was fun. I, I enjoyed, uh, the discussion, Matt. Uh, any takeaways on your end? No, I loved it. Let's, let's do it again. 35:20 And what- It was cool... what are you up to? Uh, you know, we'll talk again in a month. What are you up to, uh, before then? There's, there's a few, um, a few conferences coming up. 35:29 I'm gonna be in London next week for the, uh, Procurement, uh, Leaders event, um, and also visiting a few, few customers and a few prospective customers in Europe. Um, there's a, a couple of other events coming up. 35:43 There's the SIG event in Chicago, the one-day event. I'm g- looking forward to that. Love SIG events. Think they're the, the, about the best ones out there, in my opinion. And just, yeah, selling, selling, selling. 35:54 [laughs] Well, better you than me, my friend. 35:57 [laughs] I'm gonna be off grid fishing for a week or two, and then, uh, yeah, and then I, I don't wanna think about what, what's on the other side of that just yet, so you'll have to ask me next time. [laughs] Okay. 36:10 Looking forward to hearing about that. That'd be cool. [upbeat music] All right. Thanks, Matt. To everybody listening, thanks for taking the time to chat with us. We'll see you again soon. Thanks, Joel. 36:20 That's a wrap on this episode of ProcureTech Unpacked. If this one resonated, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for the Procurement newsletter for weekly insights between episodes. 36:30 If something we covered sparked a question or an idea, we'd love to hear from you. All the links for the reports we discussed are in the show notes. We'll see you next time.
