Certa was born with a founding mission – simplify the way businesses work with third parties.
For CEO Jag Lamba, that mission hasn’t shifted since the company was created in 2015. Lamba came up with the idea for Certa after witnessing the many inefficiencies and complexities of the third party lifecycle at large organisations. He discovered that managing third party risk and compliance was always more challenging than it should be, so he was determined to do something about it.
Certa’s goal is to improve the way businesses manage third party relationships by simplifying workflows, automating processes, and delivering full visibility. Now, more than 100,000 users do business via Certa.
“What differentiates Certa is that it is a full spectrum of risk compliance and sustainability as it relates to third parties,” explains Lamba. “It’s comprehensive, but it can be deployed in a modular manner. Secondly, it’s very agile, so it’s easy to make changes with all the different regulations which is really important because companies need a very agile solution in today’s world. Lastly, it is intelligent. What I mean by that is beyond rules-based decision-making, we have generative AI embedded into the platform, and that makes lots of tasks much, much easier.”
A common joke in procurement is that the majority of practitioners fall into the space by accident. Not for Lamba. His journey into the industry was more of a conscious decision. “Previously, I was a consultant with McKinsey and I was working across clients. I noticed that one of their biggest pain points was that working across third parties was really challenging,” says Lamba. “As soon as I realised this, I understood that what’s challenging is all the risks and the compliance requirements that you need to cover when you work with third parties because you can’t work with just anyone. That’s what got me interested in this space as I wanted to solve this challenge.”
Lamba speaks to CPOstrategy at DPW Amsterdam 2024. This year’s conference focuses on the theme of 10X, the notion that companies should aim for a moonshot mindset instead of an incremental approach. “This is the first time that I actually see the 10X vision possible,” explains Lamba. “The main reason for this is because of the improvements in generative AI. For the first time, we can see this tectonic platform shift into what we’ve been calling the new productivity revolution. Companies in the procurement space and otherwise can now deploy AI Copilots and agents. Copilots can improve productivity by up to 50%. But AI agents can actually improve productivity 10X because AI agents are like coworkers. You can actually give them tasks and manage outcomes. That is your path to 10X.”
However, one of the biggest barriers to achieving 10X is getting buy-in. Change management is about delivering new ways of working in a considered and strategic manner while showcasing the benefits of giving up legacy systems and processes. “Change management is a difficult hurdle,” he says. “How do you sell that internally? How do you get adoption and how do you change your company based on all the new capability and automation that’s available to you? It’s the biggest problem procurement faces.”
Generative AI is changing the game in procurement. Through Certa AI, users can use natural language to create workflows, directly engage with data for sharp insights and supercharge supplier onboarding with automatic form-filling. For instance, instead of asking suppliers to answer hundreds of questions manually, businesses can use Certa AI to synthesise past responses and live data from the web to auto-complete questionnaires. Certa’s Risk AI also analyses and reasons via documents, extracting key information to enhance decision-making and streamline risk management.
“We were quite early adopters of generative AI,” explains Lamba. “We have generative AI live with 10 large enterprise clients which is rare. Now we are seeing incredible productivity benefits. Overall, generative AI is a tectonic-like technology platform shift that is ushering in this productivity revolution. Over five years, it’ll be as impactful as the communication revolution behind it, even potentially the industrial revolution before it. This is going to be massive. Generative AI will go through disillusionment phases, but can you imagine your life without the internet now? That’s how transformational this technology is and we’re only at the beginning.”
However, Lamba is well aware that generative AI adoption is not a straightforward and smooth process. According to him, there are four key considerations that should be thought about before leveraging generative AI into operations. “The reason why evaluating generative AI is tricky is because it’s relatively easy for software providers to create a sexy demo,” explains Lamba.
“You can actually do that in as little as six weeks, but to create a production-level system requires a lot more than a sexy demo. Now to get a product to completion, you need efficacy and reliability, ideally in the real world. As an evaluator, you want to ensure that the solution provider is giving you hard metrics on how efficacious and reliable the technology is.
“Secondly, you need a detailed audit trail because generative acts on your behalf so you want to understand all the steps that it did. Thirdly, you want some guardrails because the technology is still new and you need to follow company policies. And lastly, which most providers aren’t doing yet, is ongoing monitoring because the underlying models change and evolve over time. Traditional software has a defined set of inputs and outputs. With generative AI, the reverse is true, and you have an unlimited number of inputs and outputs. It’s a lot more challenging.”
With so much digital transformation and innovation at procurement’s fingertips today, Lamba is keen to stress how excited he is for the future ahead. “Working across companies, which is what procurement and supply chain does, is mainly an unstructured data problem because there’s no centralised database across companies,” he discusses. “Finally, we have a technology, generative AI, that is designed to work with unstructured data. As far as I am concerned, in the last 20 years this is the most exciting time to be in procurement. This function will be at the forefront of this revolution.”
Find out more about Certa here.