Without accurate data, how can you get reliable results?

Recent conversations from the Procuretech Founders’ Circle in London, hosted with Kearney.

GenAI remains a hot topic in Procurement, and was one of the top discussions at our recent Founders’ Circle in London, where we welcomed 40+ corporates, B2B investors and digital solutions.  

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What did the attendees have to say about GenAI’s impact on Procurement?  

Michael Rooney, Principal at ProcureTech, led the interactive session, where he welcomed all to share their views on GenAI (anonymously).  

“I believe that significant value will be derived from models which provide deep Procurement skills and capabilities. These specialised models will start to develop quickly, as organisations adopt and modify open models (white box) then apply their specific business logic and data.” Michael Rooney, Principal at ProcureTech  

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What are the biggest use cases for GenAI in Procurement?  

• Analytical tasks  
• Automating supplier customer exchanges - moving many Procurement and Sourcing activities from ‘events’ to ‘continuous’  
• Category management  
• Category strategies  
• Contract drafting and review  
• Contract generation and review  
• Contract lifecycle management  
• Data labelling
• Document generation and market intelligence  
• Drafting policies
• Inputs to strategy and analysis, such as cost structure  
• Knowledge management  
• Market intelligence  
• Negotiations  
• Operations teams  
• Price comparison, cross company analysis and vendor management
• Product comparisons  
• Putting together negotiation packages
• RFP writing  
• Scraping and pulling supplier data, without intervention from the client or supplier  
• Summarising RfPs and contracts  
• Supplier identification  
• Supplier recommendation and benchmarking  
• Supplier search  
• Understanding messy qualitative data from suppliers (which has been traditionally handled through human interactions)
• Writing and evaluating RFPs  

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Based on the responses, it appears that GenAI has the power to transform approaches to handling contracts, suggesting this could both free up time and minimise mistakes caused by human error.  

What are the critical success factors for embedding GenAI in Procurement?

• Having suitable, high quality data  
• Removing any existing bias  
• Clear ROI cases  
• Determining the expectation when generating vs executing  
• Common sense and good judgement  
• Understanding when to use and when not  
• Ensuring credibility
• Using to support procurement professionals, rather than taking over  
• Access to private instances with APIs enabled  
• Critical thinking and analysis  
• Human in the loop – to overcome the issues of false positives and inaccuracies
• Data security, particularly when using customer data
• Rules of engagement – when and how to use  
• Realisation around accuracy and risk  
• An informed procurement community, and educating users how to get the best outputs from GenAI  
• Ease of use  
• Starting with augmenting the individual  
• Breaking down barriers between internal clients and procurement

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Accuracy played a key part in the session, but also in establishing the critical success factors for Procurement. Without accurate data, there’s no telling what potential consequences there could be.  

Interested in the Procuretech Founders’ Circle? Follow ProcureTech and connect with us on LinkedIn.  

There will be more collaborations and Procuretech Founders’ Circles taking place across the UK, US and Europe.  

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