OPINION: Disrupting Procurement with AI, while appreciating the work they do…
Written by: Anthony Ferrier, Managing Director at Choir Digital
I’ve got to be honest, as a consultant into large enterprises, I always dreaded the message saying: Hi Anthony, This is Joe Blow from X Company Procurement, and I’d like to talk about the opportunity you’ve been discussing with my colleague blah, blah blah…..
Right away I knew that someone would be jumping in the middle of a carefully managed sales process, asking lots of annoying questions, pushing me on price and just stopping my hard work to move a project from an idea to an executable / impactful engagement.
And perhaps, just perhaps, I’d do my best to push past / around them as quickly, efficiently as possible. I wanted to get to the bloody sale!
And maybe, I didn't really appreciate these people’s efforts. Sure, conceptually I understood their value from the client’s perspective. They were seeking to drive efficiency in purchase decisions, provide a layer of oversight to align various projects, and limit confusion / duplication / distraction from across complex organisations.
But I’ve recently been working with some Procurement teams, and I am REFORMED!! I now have a better understanding of the pressures they face, the daily complexity they navigate, and the challenges of working across such a diverse network of stakeholders.
The impact of disruption lands squarely in the lap of these professionals. Needs change, stakeholders appear out of nowhere, external environments shift over night, and vendors (who me) keep pushing, pushing. Not easy.
For these Procurement leaders, the waterfall process they’ve been applying forever are no longer fit-for-purpose. Procurement practitioners just can’t keep up with rigid, manual processes.
In response, Choir Digital have developed an agent-enabled Procurement offering, where we focus on different modules / stages of the Procurement process, including:
Agentic Market Assessment: When an organisation is seeking to pull together a short-list of vendors / platforms that align to their requirements
RFP Request Preparation: Agents can pull business / tech needs into a structured set of RFP materials, that communicate the client’s needs, context and cultural and business drivers to vendors
RFP Evaluation Engine: Assesses RFP responses to a client’s requirements, and validating those statements against external sources as an opportunity to drive efficiency / impact of Procurement function
With each module, we blend human-in-the-loop support / control with secure agentic tools. We’ve already applied the Agentic Market Assessment module to a global healthcare client, and it worked beautifully. It created clear, defensible and thorough vendor recommendations to the client. Beyond the shortlist recommendations, we provided detailed architecture and data-flow guidance, along with implementation and change management framing, to support the client as they seek to install a platform into their workflow.
Based on the success of this effort, the client is now exploring how they can use the agentic approach to assess RFP vendor submissions, to ensure they align to their requirements / needs. Importantly, the agent provides external validation / assessment of claims, providing an additional layer of insight to the client. Exciting times!
Benefits of this offering include:
Flexibility, our agent-enabled approach can quickly flex to evolving requirements and new stakeholder needs, as understanding around the opportunity evolves. This is as opposed to a more structured waterfall process, where requirements changes can kick off a wholesale redo of efforts
Speed, working with agentic tools, we can condense a complex procurement process down to a weeks, rather than a drawn out months-long process, as a drain on internal resources
Quality, the traditional trade-off of speed, cost and quality falls apart with this offering. By blending a structured, human-in-the-loop workflow with the tool, we can ensure defensible, validated findings, so an organisation can make a confident decision to move forward on strategic purchase decisions.
Holistic Approach, we can leverage our senior architecture, development and training resources to provide detailed, value adding support and impact to key purchase decisions.
So, we’re off to a great start with this process, with a great set of tools, a team chomping at the bit and a happy client. If you want to learn more about our approach, feel free to connect with us?
Cheers
Anthony