Not since the onset of the pandemic has the world of procurement played such a pivotal role in global business as it does in today’s volatile geopolitical climate. Over the past month, headlines have been dominated by US tariffs on key commodities such as steel, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, and growing tensions between China and […]
Not since the onset of the pandemic has the world of procurement played such a pivotal role in global business as it does in today’s volatile geopolitical climate.
Over the past month, headlines have been dominated by US tariffs on key commodities such as steel, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, and growing tensions between China and Taiwan—home to approximately 80% of the world’s semiconductor production.
These factors alone—not to mention inflation in many parts of the world—are exerting immense pressure on supply chains, leading to market uncertainty and unpredictability.
Against this turbulent backdrop, Paris played host to a procurement conference organised by French platform vendor Ivalua, which gathered key figures in procurement in a venue beneath the city’s iconic Louvre.
The setting for Ivalua Now seemed fitting: just as the Louvre preserves cultural treasures through centuries of change, procurement professionals must safeguard their organisations against ongoing disruptions.
A key question this year focused on whether advances in AI and digital technology could help procurement professionals mitigate these mounting challenges and build more resilient supply chains.
Agents for chaos
One delegate at the event, Kathryn Thompson, who leads the Procurement Practice for Deloitte UK, describes procurement as “The art of commercial decision making.”
She adds: “You get to view the whole extended enterprise which is sometimes bigger than the enterprise itself. And that is powerful.”
Kathryn Thompson, head of procurement, Deloitte UK
Powerful, but also challenging, as Ivalua’s new CEO Franck Lheureux acknowledged in his opening keynote.
“Procurement has never been so critical to your business, and to the world. Everything you procure has a direct impact on people’s lives, on your company’s performance.
“Inflation. Conflicts. They disrupt people’s lives; they disrupt your organisation and force a change in your function and in what your board, shareholders and customers expect from you.
“Priorities are shifting by the day, by the week, by the month. How long can you project your future if you are constantly forced to react on a day-by-day basis?”
The answer, somewhat inevitably for a tech vendor, seemed to lie with generative AI.
Lheureux suggested that large language models (LLMs) could help chief procurement officers (CPOs) capture unknown patterns that they weren’t able to process before.
“In today’s world, we can encompass natural language with your technology to help you chat with your analytics data and integrate your database to make smarter, better, faster decisions. You can chat with your contract; you can chat with your customers and suppliers. The technology is there,” he claimed.
Guided decision making with AI? “We’re 80% there”
Well, almost. Ivalua’s founder David Khuat-Duy —who stepped down as the 25 year old company’s CEO a few months ago to focus on the firm’s AI endeavours—explains that his company is “about 80% there” in terms of creating an agentic experience for Ivalua’s users.
“There’s a bigger gap than you think between the theory and the reality,” he admits. “We are talking about complex processes, complex organisations. It’s not always easy to apply AI to the real world.”
David Khuat-Duy , Ivalua’s former CEO turned chief AI officer
During the conference, Khuat-Duy outlined the company’s strategic focus for its upcoming V10 platform.
First off, he has asked that his firm to practise what it preaches—enhancing Ivalua’s own internal operations by deploying large-scale AI solutions within the company.
This “test-in-house” approach, he explained, will allow for improved customer support, streamlined partner interactions, and accelerated processes.
A notable use case, he added, has been in applying Gen AI to code migration for V10, where AI assists in specification creation and code generation to boost productivity.
According to Khuat-Duy , Gen AI is also changing Ivalua’s software design process. The platform, known for its configurability, will use AI-guided navigation to simplify development.
The company will offer multi-step AI processes, such as a “Category Research Assistant,” which interacts with users to capture information dynamically and guide decision-making.
While Ivalua is also embedding advanced AI capabilities directly into V10 to improve practical applications like contract summarisation, the next phase will involve autonomous agents capable of answering complex questions without predefined workflows.
According to Khuat-Duy , achieving this requires a robust enterprise-grade platform that ensures compliance, data security, and accurate responses.
Khuat-Duy highlights accuracy as a major hurdle; AI must be highly precise to deliver reliable insights.
To this end, he says that Ivalua is building a quality control framework “One that combines human feedback with self-learning mechanisms to improve outcomes.”
Lastly, Ivalua is rethinking its UX design for flexibility, integrating voice-enabled interactions and ensuring the system remains adaptable to evolving AI models.
This full vision won’t arrive this year, Khuat-Duy admitted, but he believes these foundations will set the stage for “a transformative, agent-driven procurement platform.”
While V10 isn’t out yet, it’s worth noting that Ivalua’s ambitious growth projections reflect a strong confidence in its market position and strategy.
The firm achieved $200 million in revenue in the last financial year – a significant milestone – and with product innovation Lheureux told conference delegates the company was targeting “$500 million to $1 billion”, although in a later press conference he would not commit to when this would be achieved.
Procurement: AI vs predictive analytics
Newcomers to the world of procurement may wonder what benefits generative AI can offer decision makers over other predictive modelling and analytic tools that have been available to the market for years.
According to Khuat-Duy , predictive modelling is neither something that Ivalua offers nor something that customers ask for.
The consensus among analysts in this field is that predictive models are based on past trends, which may not always accurately forecast future disruptions, especially in volatile markets.
While it’s true that generative AI also relies on past data, it excels in different ways.
Predictive analytics typically uses structured data (prices, order volumes etc) to forecast outcomes. Generative AI, however, can analyse both structured and unstructured data—like emails, contracts, and supplier communications—to extract insights that predictive models might miss.
Transforming the supply chain to manage risk and gain a competitive edge
This contextual understanding helps uncover patterns that aren’t strictly numerical. The thinking is that generative AI can adapt to changing market conditions, such as unexpected raw material shortages or supplier bankruptcies.
AI-as-a-service?
Whether generative AI will help procurement in any significant way over the next couple of years remains to be seen according to Deloitte’s Thompson.
Speaking at the conference to TI, she added that procurement often struggles to secure investment for AI initiatives because it competes with higher-priority business areas like R&D, product launches, and sales—areas where ROI is more immediate and compelling.
She adds that, of all the different tech implementations she has overseen in the past 20 years, the capacity for humans to ingest the change needs to be a considered factor.
“Even when we have implemented solutions that have pulled some Gen AI into, the amount of information is overwhelming. Gen AI can deal with it, but as humans we’re still learning,” she added.
However, Thompson suggests that AI-as-a-service may be a viable solution for procurement teams, providing flexible, cost-effective access to AI capabilities without major infrastructure overhauls.
“One where AI agents could guide users through procurement processes, offering practical support despite limited budgets and resources.”
And while its development may still need some development for this particular function, given the chaos of the last couple of years, months and days, overlooking AI’s potential in procurement may no longer be a risk businesses can afford to take.
