Taking on a new leadership role can be both exciting and daunting. Dafydd Llewellyn is the CEO of HICX, having taken up the mantle in September. In fact, by the time we spoke with him, he’d only been at his post for five weeks – but he was buzzing with nothing but pure enthusiasm about it. At this crucial juncture, when the pace of change is faster than ever before, strong leadership is vital. As such, Llewellyn has his hand on the tiller as he guides HICX on the next part of its journey.
“We’re a supplier management platform,” he says. “Companies work with us because they want to transform their supplier management to become more unified, more strategic, and more intelligent. Ultimately, what that means is our customers’ businesses are really able to make the most and harness the power of the suppliers.”
AI in the real world
Being competitive in the modern day means being not just au fait with artificial intelligence, but having a deeper understanding of it. The theme of DPW Amsterdam this year, as with the New York event in June, was ‘Put AI to work’. While AI has been a topic of discussion for several years now, planning (and bracing) for its impact is a different matter. But HICX, led by Llewellyn, is ready.
“It’s great that DPW is focusing on AI,” he says. “At HICX, we are being very deliberate about the way we approach AI. The way we’re looking at it is really about using AI to allow procurement professionals to be more value-added in the tasks they do, and remove all the repetitive tasks that they really don’t want to be doing. They can drive more value for the business that way.
“So, we are looking at things around business processes and automation, right through to document capture, through to compliance checks; using AI agents enables us to do that,” Llewellyn continues. “I can give you a real-life example. If you think about the workflow for a new supplier in the old days, you’d have to have them involved to create that workflow. Now, we can use AI to create that workflow just by writing it in natural language.”
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