Procurement software platform Ivalua’s IVALUA NOW 2025 event is currently underway in Paris. Over 800 procurement professionals and representatives from the sector’s largest technology firms, procurement software vendors, and businesses with significant procurement functions — including Accenture, Prada, EcoVadis, Deloitte, and Bulgari — are in attendance to network and explore ongoing developments in procurement.
Across multiple keynote addresses, Q&As, and panels, procurement leaders are exploring the biggest themes and challenges defining the current procurement landscape.
Disruption and collaboration
Ivalua CMO Alec Saric opened the event with an acknowledgement of the challenges facing the procurement sector. “On top of everything else that’s been going on, it seems like we now have to contend with weekly changes to trade policies. They force us to assess the impact on our organisations, reassess our supply strategies, and it’s all happening so fast,” he said, but added that, “the best way to deal with all this is to learn from each other.”
Ivalua’s newly appointed CEO, Franck Lheureux, echoed the sentiment. “Procurement has never been [this] critical to your organisations,” he said. “I think about the word, and I’m not shy about using it, chaos.” He highlighted tariffs, inflation, and the growing threat of conflict around the world as the defining characteristics of procurement and supply chain management at this increasingly unpredictable moment in time. “How can you think about and project the future if you are constantly forced to react on a day-to-day basis?”
A bright, if loosely defined AI future
When it came to celebrating and acknowledging the opportunities facing procurement and the strategies they expect to help procurement navigate this complex landscape, Artificial Intelligence was something of a leitmotif for the discussion. However, it’s interesting to see — especially in an hour-long talk which probably devoted about 70% of its time across four speakers to Ivalua’s AI strategy — some sober acknowledgement that, as Lheureux put it, “GenAI is not the answer.”
Saric acknowledged that “I know many of you have already started using AI to some extent and we can be honest: so far, the impact has hardly been transformational.”
However, Saric added that, despite a slower impact than expected, he doesn’t believe that AI is “just another hype technology” like blockchain or the metaverse. Nevertheless, he stressed that “the changes that are taking place, both in terms of their speed and magnitude, are really unbelievable.”
The keynote also saw an address by Ivalua’s founder and ex-CEO, David Khuat-Duy, who passed from the CEO role to that of Chief AI Officer in January. There’s no denying that Ivalua is, like much of the procurement software space, still betting big on GenAI, regardless of a slower-than-anticipated arrival of transformative value creation.
“We want to free people up to do what humans do best — relationships and strategy.” — Alec Saric, CMO, Ivalua
Ivalua’s dedication towards the implementation of more agentic, autonomous AI — with human oversight and a big emphasis on compliance and data security — over the coming year that enables organisations to be resilient and agile in a constantly changing world is clear. However, as Saric told CPO Strategy in a later interview, AI’s total autonomy isn’t part of the current conversation. “From a technology perspective, you want it to be that good and reliable that [it can work along], but we’re not recommending that strategic activities be completely handed off to a robot. It always makes sense for humans to be in the loop when [the decision] is strategic.”
He noted, however, that when it comes to managing tail spend, sourcing one-off purchases, and “more tactical activities, yes, the goal is to try and get as much of that off the table so that humans can focus on strategy and the relationships. We want to free people up to do what humans do best.”
