Leadership came together at the Amazon Business headquarters in Seattle to recall the past decade’s triumphs as well as future plans for Gen-AI in procurement…
Last year marked the 30th birthday of one of, if not the, most influential conglomerates in the world. This year it celebrates its most critical period for commerce as Amazon Business (AB) concludes its first decade – the next one showing even more promise of technical innovation and elevation of procurement in the corporate eye.
At the Amazon Business Reshape event in Seattle, its very own leadership team offered profound words on the triumphs of its tenure and the ripple effects that will encourage continued customer focus. In the era of digital solutions, supply chain visibility and tech innovation, the talk of the event was the business’ undying commitment to customers – commercial and consumer.
At the turning of a 10-year clock, influential figures gathered at the event to celebrate AB’s achievements that continue to align its customers with the trends in supply chain, procurement and commercial digitalisation.
Customer focus remains at the core of Amazon
While Amazon’s intent has remained the same for decades, talks at the AB event swayed heavily towards a core topic – procurement. Specifically – and perhaps inevitably – the technologies it offers to companies in need of more intelligent solutions.
In early discussions, Doug Gray, Chief Technology Officer at AB, outlined the procurement attention shift towards automation and analytics to maintain its long-standing customer-centric position. It was in this context that we learned of new, generative-AI-based technologies, and their involvement in procurement’s evolution.
“Automation is no longer a future aspiration,” says Gray. “According to IDC research, 97% of procurement professionals say automation and AI are important to streamline their procurement processes.”
In this context, he introduced Amazon Business Assistant—a conversational AI with deep Amazon business expertise—that will provide instant contextual guidance right where procurement managers need it. Besides this, there are myriad administrative changes to the AB platform, the majority essential for simplified digital procurement.
It is almost impossible to quote all the changes to the AB platform with such diversity of updates. These include deferred delivery for US customers, as well as delivery consolidation, security, invoice automation, locker-based restocking and inventory management, and so on. This is all part of AB’s drive to empower businesses and tailor customer support.
This is the sum of the event and AB’s driving factor, according to Global VP Selley Salomon who said to the crowds in Seattle: “The programme goal is to empower employees to make over 95% of purchases without manager approval, saving time and improving the employee experience”.
Backing procurement professionals and their decision-making
It has become evident over the AB’s lifespan that disruption may hide around any corner. Since gaining major awareness in the supply chain realm, procurement has become the defining factor of supply chain success—the building of resilient, risk-averse supply chains.
Gray highlighted the significant lack of visibility in the face of inclining procurement pressures. This realisation has driven much of AB’s approach to its own evolution in order to provide its enterprise customers with more insight to influence more proactive sourcing activities.
“Our North Star is to invent ways to help all procurement stakeholders move effortlessly from one step to the next,” Gray said. “I’m excited to announce several new Amazon Business features”.
The features concerning procurement are, unsurprisingly, AI-powered—a welcome addition according to 63% of organisations who confirm the benefits. This is due to the fact that companies want deeper insights, and at record rates. They wish to simplify, yet ramp up their procurement without the inherent risks that come with an increase in speed.
“Customer service is one of the first places where this acceleration is showing up,” said Gray. Then he addressed the room by saying “I’m sure this is something that everyone in this room has experienced, whether ordering groceries or making travel arrangements”.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Amazon offers a host of services to equip businesses for the challenges ahead. For instance, intuitive spend-anomaly monitoring will give companies greater insight into their purchasing habits, allowing them to track trends, stay compliant, and ultimately make savings.
“Research shows that 65% of procurement peers report a lack of visibility across their organisations’ purchasing activity,” Gray added. “A challenge that only grows as teams expand across departments and geographies between scattered systems, siloed teams and shifting internal priorities, procurement and failure”.
During further discussion, Jeff Austin, Global VP Supply Chain Services at Jabil, told Gray that “business-intelligence enterprise AI has caught up, so we’re putting it to work.”
At Jabil, the focus lies in supplier data, internal purchase data, inventory information, and logistics information. Leveraging Amazon’s Gen-AI, Jabil is able to expand its data collection and leverage the tool to identify cycles from importing and sourcing to more external elements like weather changes, and the effects they create.
Emma Chontos, Chief Procurement Officer and Head of Global Sourcing & Procurement at Intuit, was part of the conversation as it shifted towards generative AI—primarily discussing its current and future applications in sourcing. She gestured to the fact that Gen AI is largely underutilised in procurement. In doing so, she said “you need to start really, really small”.
This is based on context from Intuit that can be found in the opening session. The company experienced significant benefits of Gen-AI implementation as a result of building tailored employee experiences that feed into the corporate system. The key point to take away from her was the need to simplify procurement prior to introducing any new or drastic measures, such as AI.
“We’ve saved 1,000s of hours just sucking it in. It’s predictive, and it’s taken out the manual aspect. But then you start to get into other things. Sometimes you have the data, but you [lack] repetition. If you aren’t clear on that process, it’s just not going to work.”
AI streamlines the undesirable processes
On the topic of AI and its innate ability to help employees shed much of their ongoing manual and repetitive workloads, AB recognises its influence on the uptake of such technologies. Brenda Spoonemore, VP of Commercial, Public and Strategic Sectors at AB, was on hand at the event to delve deeper into its applications across today’s most critical industries.
One of her core messages about AI; its main incentive is to allow better human connection between employees and customers.
“Let humans be humans,” Spoonemore says. “Let them do the things humans are really good at”. This comment follows her perspective on the relationship between people and AI as she nods to concerns of its takeover. The response was well-rounded, though, advocating the ability to harness both technological and hum capabilities. Spoonemore believes in each working collaboratively without compromise, which means letting AI handle processes, improvement, efficiency, and data to target areas within business operation. As for staff, the balance comes from authenticity, which is a fundamental human strength.
Spoonemore explains that some businesses simply “don’t let humans be humans and do the things we’re good at, which is building relationships and getting deeper into problem solving”.
She also emphasises the inevitability of AI—something that businesses can often turn a blind eye to. A crucial part for Amazon has been to take its customer mindset and translate it into human-AI collaboration.
“I think reprogramming the software between our ears is the hardest part,” says Spoonemore. “At Amazon, we work backwards. We start with what the customer problem is like, what the problem is, and the opportunity.”
She elaborates with an analogy: “If I had a magic wand, I’d want to be able to do x, y, z. And then you start to think, ‘well, there might be a way to do that’. It’s about rewiring ourselves to think differently”.
Know the problem before AI can solve it
In terms of rewiring, Satya Mishra, Director, Product and Technology at AB dug deeper into different buyers and their purchasing journeys, stating the importance of effective data flows before implementing into AI.
“Unidirection means from suppliers to your procurement system to your indefinite delivery contract (IDC) system,” says Mishra. “That’s actually incorrect. The data needs to flow in both directions.”
Tying this into the idea of ‘starting small’, the talk on IDC Insights for Eliminating Manual Inefficiencies really honed in on the idea of incremental implementation. This was a core point of this year’s event—to get the simple things right before adopting technology for more intricate business functions. One of the biggest challenges for companies using AI is their understanding of how it fits long-term, but that gradual implementation can shed some light on workflow inefficiencies.
Mishra said procurement should always “pick up something that is low complexity, but high return in value.” He also stated—perhaps a core message for the entire event—is to “make sure that you have a very strong foundation built in”.
This is exactly what Amazon Business strives to achieve following its hit in Seattle this year, and its upcoming 2026 event in Nashville – part of a growing calendar of customer-focused conferences showcasing its new wave of procurement foundations. In the process we expect to see the use of AI evolve among its customers.