Keelvar: AI-first sourcing solutions

For the past 13 years, Keelvar has grown to become a market leader in advanced sourcing optimisation and autonomous sourcing for procurement. Led by CEO and Founder Alan Holland since the company’s creation in 2012, Holland has witnessed first-hand how the procurement function has mobilised and embraced AI amid industry-wide digital transformation journeys. 

And that past isn’t lost on Holland.

“As a company that came from an AI research lab, it’s fascinating to remember that in our early days when we were talking about AI to prospects and customers, they weren’t really listening,” he recalls. “In some ways they thought we were techies, maybe a little too far away from the problems that they had at that time. I guess, in some ways, they were right because they weren’t yet ready to adopt AI. But I still have no regrets that we needed to start building then because the frameworks for successful AI adoption require deep foundations. In the realm of sourcing, in order to do the process in the best way possible, you’ve got to have a sourcing optimiser that can reason about expressive bid information from suppliers, expressive constraints and preferences from your stakeholders. That’s the key to having efficiency and speed.”

Keelvar is committed to delivering ‘AI-first’ instead of ‘AI-enhanced’ sourcing solutions, demonstrating a firm mission is to scale sourcing excellence. For Holland, he believes that sourcing excellence revolves around approaching suppliers with transparency. “You must be clear about what you need from them, what your expectations are, what excellence looks like for you, and how you will measure their performance,” explains Holland. “At its core, sourcing excellence is about rich communication. But it can often be multifaceted so there’s always trade-offs to be had. If you look behind the curtain of any supplier, you don’t know just how much complexity there is. But if you can allow them to condition their offers based on the right structure of the package of items that would suit them, then that’s a good way of supporting excellence.”

One of the most important pieces of the puzzle to Keelvar is the power of interoperability and connectivity. According to Holland, interoperability in particular holds the key to success for enterprise procurement teams who want to lean into AI. “To successfully adopt AI, you’ve got to get your hands around your data and you’ve got to be able to pass that data between systems seamlessly,” Holland tells us. “The age of trying to copy and paste data from one system to another is not acceptable anymore. You’ll be left behind if you haven’t got neat and user-friendly integrations that are a single click in effect. You can pass the results of one process in a system as an input into the process in another system.”

Find out more about Keelvar here.