Putting AI to work – DPW 2025

What does this year’s DPW 2025 theme – ‘Put AI to work’ – mean to you, and how does that resonate within your organisation?

Tatjana Ozgoren, PepsiCo

I’m leading digital transformation in procurement, so clearly AI resonates very much. We’ve seen a tremendous evolution of artificial intelligence over the years, starting from traditional to generative. Now agentic AI is the talk of the town. I was just reading a research paper recently that was suggesting that up to 50% of what procurement professionals will do over the next five to seven years will change due to agentic AI. And I think we can argue different ways whether that would truly materialise or not. But the fact is, artificial intelligence is here in different forms, shapes and agents, and as a matter of fact, it’s very popular.

Marloes Strik, Zeiss

Oh, it’s the future, definitely and the future is happening now. And that’s also why I did my MBA thesis on this. The research concerned how mid-size companies can adopt AI? And I see a lot of companies still struggling with it, yet it brings so much value and not just for procurement. It brings value to the whole organisation. And that’s exactly the narrative we should have. It brings more reliability towards your customers. It gives brand protection and a faster time to market for your product.

Ashish Tiwari, Aptiv

AI is happening and the technology is evolving very fast. I think we (Aptiv) will give a little more ability and flexibility to AI when exploring new areas where the rule-based method is not needed, meaning AI will define its own rules and be able to deliver the outcome. I think it’s a simple scenario. When you start riding a bicycle, you don’t start straight away with a big bike, you start with a smaller bike and you have sliders. Then you get confident so you remove the sliders and you eventually get to the bigger bike. I think that’s the way it’s going to be. You will need an army of agentic AIs in your organisation. And over a period of time, when someone lays out their organisational structure, and they mention the name of the people, their role and their location, you will see agentic AI written out there with their location and the role they’re performing. 

Ilona Piekoszewska, Givaudan

AI speaks a lot to me. We’ve been discussing AI for many months or years now to say how do we really implement it? We have a successful story to tell because over the last 12 months we were able to deploy five different tools to help us resolve some of our major problems. The category strategies needed to be more dynamic, and so, this is where we deployed another tool. AI and digital are all about the good data. Data for me, is a crucial thing. We can’t imagine our team members in the future working seven or 10 tools. I think they are great separately, but how do we orchestrate that in the future? And this is what we are looking at together as a team to find a solution: one source of interaction for our teams and our internal customers. 

Tom Kniveton, Rolls Royce

As a company we have some restrictions around how we can use AI and where we can put our data and how our data is used. But fundamentally, we’ve started to use some of the capabilities around agentic AI that we see here at DPW. It’s allowed us to do a lot more. We know that procurement is growing all the time. We’re asking the same teams to do more and more and more. The scope’s growing. So, it’s just allowing us to pick up some of the work that perhaps people don’t feel like they can get to. We’re trying to see how it can work alongside people. That’s part of the challenge. But we’re making that step. 

Lars Bettermann, Bridgestone

The opportunities with AI are enormous, but success depends on how we apply it. Technology is only as good as the people behind it. As leaders, it’s our job to hire the right talent, build skills, and empower teams to use these tools effectively. There’s no way around AI; our stakeholders, management and suppliers all expect it. The question isn’t if we’ll use it, but how – and that’s exactly the challenge and opportunity facing procurement today.

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