Over the past decade or so, the procurement function has undergone a seismic transformation.
Today, the function looks almost unrecognisable as a result of the adoption of new technologies that are reshaping how procurement leaders operate day-to-day. As part of that, the importance of a procurement ecosystem which hosts a variety of different solutions has become increasingly important within the modern landscape.
Born in Europe’s largest AI research lab, Keelvar has become a market leader in advanced sourcing optimisation and autonomous sourcing for procurement. Under the leadership of Alan Holland, CEO and Founder of the company, Keelvar is committed to delivering ‘AI-first’ instead of ‘AI-enhanced’ sourcing solutions.
“Procurement has long struggled with the multiplicity of different systems, and in fact, the first unicorns were procuretech companies so procuretech goes back a long way,” explains Holland. “The challenge is that many of the earliest procurement solutions were built on old technology stacks before the internet really started to evolve fully and develop frameworks. Even languages like Python only started to become popular in the last 12 or 13 years. The types of languages, frameworks and libraries that have recently appeared have allowed more modern technologies to be more user-centric. It is critical that enterprises lean into the procurement ecosystem heavily now because there are quite a few best-of-breed solutions solving a variety of challenges so much better than older solutions are doing. But it’s a combination of these best-of-breeds that really give this force multiplier effect and the enterprises that adopt those wholeheartedly see huge benefits from doing so.”
One of the biggest crazes in procurement at the moment is agentic AI. But while its popularity is relatively recent, agents aren’t actually new to Keelvar. “We’ve built it from the bottom up,” Holland tells us. “We’ve built a workflow engine first of all that supports what agents can do. Agents can work at a greater speed and pull more levers more quickly than a human could do. If you think of any sourcing system, there are bikes and cars that aren’t very high powered, but then there’s high powered Ferraris which would be the sourcing optimisation engines that typically experts in large enterprises would use for their biggest sourcing projects annually. That was the classical way of adopting sourcing optimisation. When you’ve got agents that can work 24/7 they can drive this Ferrari for you so that you can have best practice executed in not just your large, but your medium and small sourcing as well. Our approach to agents has been one to start at the foundation and build this skyscraper with layers of a reasoning engine. That’s what’s key.”
Keelvar is working closely with ORO Labs and was chosen as one of its key, strategic partners to work within its ORO Open ecosystem. Holland believes the relationship with ORO is one of synergy and stresses the two organisations bring the best out of each other. “We can see with our joint customers already that enterprises are looking to compose suites themselves,” he says. “They want to have a choice over if they have ORO for orchestration, or Keelvar for sourcing, they could have one, two, or three other spend analytics solutions or from two or three other contract lifecycle management solutions. If any of us vendors aren’t doing what we ought to be doing, then they see the benefits of being able to plug in and out vendors. It’s almost like a way of ensuring vendors stay true to their word. The problem with having a suite provider is that you’re integrated with everything and it is a major upheaval to try and switch from one suite to another, whereas you could more incrementally adapt your tech strategy in procurement by having a composed suite of your own. That extensibility and interchangeability offers very valuable optionality to enterprises.”
Find out more about Keelvar here.