Procurement intelligence, value creation and AI-native delivery from a practitioner who has advised, built and operated the function.
Every bet about the future of the procurement leader’s role needs the same thing underneath it, and almost no one is building it. Let me name it, and let me be blunt, because hedging this would be a kind of lie. The thing is…
Get the posture right and a procurement function works. Which raises the only question left: what is the CPO's seat actually becoming? I've stopped answering that with a trend line. The role does not extend. It re-forms, the way…
Capabilities are only inputs. What matters is what they add up to when a procurement transformation actually works, and I've watched enough of them now to answer it. Three that succeeded sit clearly in my memory. They shared…
Changing your mind is cheap. Building the capability the new view demands is the expensive part, and Yasmin was the one in the room actually building it. She had a hiring plan in front of her and she hated it. It was a sensible…
I used to think that owning your data down to the last definition was overkill. I've been wrong about bigger things, and one of them I defended in public for years. For most of a decade I was a true believer in shared services.
On AI project after AI project, readiness fails at the same place: nobody owns the data, so nobody can fix it. Yasmin decided she wouldn't inherit that problem. She would author her way out of it. She had a blank sheet, which in…
A clean business case still dies on contact with an organization that can't absorb it. Mei-Lin learned it the hard way, and not in the way the slides warned her about. Her GenAI pilot the year before had taught her where the…
The same discipline that ruins a spec ruins a technology business case: it asks for everything and prices nothing. Every tool deck I'm handed leads with the return. The number is enormous, the slide is confident, and it's…
Structure decides who chooses. It doesn't teach them what to ask for. And asking well is a discipline procurement borrowed from the wrong neighbor. We learned negotiation from sales and law. We should've learned specification…
Once you've decided how many suppliers, you still have to decide who owns the decision. And that question has been answered the wrong way for thirty years, as if it had one answer. Baani Sandhu, who runs procurement at a…
Sorting tools is the easy sort. The supplier base is where it gets expensive. And the first instinct, the one every playbook rewards, is to make the base smaller. Hendrik Vos has run procurement at a Dutch consumer-goods…
Most procurement teams believe they've already settled the first question about AI: which kind does what. Pattern recognition on structured data, or reasoning over unstructured language. Two strategies, not one. It looks settled.
Procurement can do far more than most companies ever ask of it, and the gap keeps widening. Yasmin Khoury lives inside that gap. She's too junior in the hierarchy to fix it and too sharp not to see it. Yasmin is a divisional CPO…
A credible number buys you a mandate. It does not buy you follow-through. Baani learned the second half of that sentence in the ninth month of a transformation that, on paper, was going fine. You've met Baani before, the CPO who…
Procurement proves its worth with one number above all others. The savings number. The first person who taught me to distrust it was Hendrik. Hendrik Vos has run procurement at a Dutch consumer-goods multinational for the better…
For years I read procurement as a price machine: a function whose job was to squeeze the best number out of a deal and move on. What changed me was one contract I got wrong by getting it right. Early in my career I negotiated a…
Why is procurement, of all functions, suddenly held to a standard nobody held it to ten years ago? The easy answer is AI. The easy answer is wrong. Every CPO I talk to feels the job got harder. Fewer can tell me whether it…
After the Sort Baani circled two of the eleven demos. The other nine struck through: defer, kill, revisit in eighteen months. The hard part was done, she thought. She was wrong about which part had been hard. Any CPO who has…
Most CPOs don't have an AI problem. They have a sorting problem. A CPO I will call Baani runs procurement at a €4bn industrial company. Good team. Clean enough data. A board that reads The Economist on Sundays. Three months ago…
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There is 15–25% of addressable spend sitting on your table right now: the largest unworked lever on your P&L.
AI-native deliveryMost firms bolted AI onto the old model and called it transformation. AI-native means the operating model was rebuilt around AI. The difference shows up in your invoice.
PE value creationYour portfolio companies are sitting on an EBITDA lever most deal models never price in: procurement.
Practitioner stories“You’re the CPO now. There is no team. Start Monday.” The brief behind our Fractional CPO offering.
Procurement intelligenceMost sourcing failures happen before the first RFQ goes out. With AI doing the legwork, answering all five now takes weeks, not months.
AI-native deliveryAn honest scorecard grounded in experience building the analytics: AI cannot negotiate, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a dashboard.
PE value creationThe first 100 days are the cheapest window you will ever have to put procurement EBITDA into the deal model.
Practitioner storiesThe most expensive lesson from years of competitive events: a supplier’s price tells you what they think you’ll pay, never what it costs them.
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