Lessons on leading procurement’s AI shift, from a day spent with customers already delivering results.
For years, procurement asked for a seat at the table. In Amsterdam on September 29 at ORO Imagine, it was clear that the seat has been earned, and that the next chapter will be written by leaders who treat AI as a reason to rethink how their organizations work. The technology is ready. The question is whether we are.
The demos and technology were impressive, but the lesson that came through in every session, from analysts, customers, and our own team, was the same: technology is no longer the constraint. Vision, data, people, and pace are. Here are five themes that stayed with us.
Procurement leaders have spent years optimizing for their own teams: better category dashboards, better buyer workbenches, better sourcing tools. Those investments matter, but they have not changed how the business experiences procurement, and most business users still do not know when to raise a purchase order, when to run a sourcing event, or when to do neither.
This is a central foundation of ORO Labs, and it continues on as a North Star for the business. As Sudhir Bhojwani, CEO and Co-Founder, said, agentic AI is a means, not an end. The end is procurement that works for everyone. Paula Glickenhaus, Chief Procurement Officer of Bristol Myers Squibb, made an even sharper version of the argument: the more we service procurement, the further we get from the patient. The test of any program is whether the requester on the other side of it has fewer clicks, fewer questions, and a faster answer.
This is why the conversation has moved from systems of record toward what ORO Labs calls a system of action: a layer that understands procurement, finance, and risk well enough to guide the user to the right next step. Done well, the user does not need to learn anything new. Peter Gomes described Siemens Energy’s version of this as putting AI in the flow of people’s work, so that the system comes to the user rather than the user chasing the system.
For years, procurement technology was judged on features. Now, procurement is being judged on time.
Live on stage, Chris Vessey and Solution Architect Sabih Rozales took a real problem from Roche, where more than two million supplier invoices and queries a year land across 200 mailboxes, and used ORO Studio to capture the requirements, design the process, and configure a working solution over a coffee break. As guests returned to the room, an emailed invoice was being matched to its purchase order and status queries were being answered with a self-service link.
Customer timelines told the same story: Pfizer’s PR review agent live in less than ten weeks, The Coca-Cola Company live in more than 100 countries in less than six months, Danone operating across 80 countries. The lesson for leaders is uncomfortable but useful: when implementation takes weeks, the slowest part of the program is no longer the technology. It is how quickly the organization can make decisions, and how clear its vision and foundations are.
A customer leadership panel hosted by Graham Moore was an incredibly honest part of the day with Danone, Siemens Energy, and DP World each describing what they would do differently, though across industries and stages of maturity, the answers were strikingly consistent. Underestimated complexity. Underestimated need for alignment across IT, finance, and the wider business. All came to the same conclusion: waiting for the perfect design costs more than launching with a clear direction and adapting along the way.
Danone’s story illustrates this; rather than waiting six to nine months for a flawless solution, the team launched a pilot and listened to the feedback. Early user satisfaction was low, but within three months satisfaction climbed sharply, and the rollout across 80 countries has been consistently smooth. Haleon’s Alpa Varma offered the same principle later on data: deal with the messy, get to 80 percent, and then start. Programs fail far more often from waiting than from imperfection.
The corollary is partnership. Every customer on stage stressed the value of a vendor willing to listen, to take hard feedback, and share the risk.
Three companies, independently, used nearly identical language: do not treat orchestration as a tool rollout. Siemens Energy described it as reinventing how people experience procurement. Paula Glickenhaus was blunt about what it cost BMS to learn that lesson:
“We implemented ORO Labs, and it was an extremely painful implementation because we were trying to implement it the way you implement SAP. It’s a big, big mistake. You cannot implement ORO Labs as if you’re only implementing a technology. You are implementing human change. Most of my resources were in change management, so my advice to all of you: you have to have a strong change management plan. You could have the best technology, but if it isn’t being used, it goes nowhere.”
Her sharpest advice focused on measurement. Savings and cost reduction will always matter, but they are not enough. If enterprises are not tracking how many users start a process in the new front door and actually finish there, rather than drifting back to the legacy system, they are not measuring adoption. BMS has committed to saving 100,000 FTE hours and has already exceeded that annual target with 150,000 hours saved, but the adoption metric makes that number credible.
Change also has to account for how people actually learn, which requires video, classroom sessions, and white-glove support for the executives who feel friction first, not another policy document to read and sign.
Amy Fong from The Everest Group offered a simple sequence for building an agentic procurement function: start with readiness, scale trust before scaling autonomy, invest in talent and change, focus on orchestration, and embed responsible AI. Notably, none of those steps are about the specific technology.
Governance was a consistent theme in the ORO Labs roadmap as well. Agents that anyone can publish to an entire organization will eventually produce an inaccurate or embarrassing answer. The Agent Builder that ORO Labs demonstrated treats agents like any other enterprise asset, with testing, versioning, performance evaluation, and controlled publishing steps.
The question around organizational structure and people deserves the same candor. Paula told her teams plainly that the job as it is done today will not exist in the future, and then made the case for why the transition is worth making: freeing time for judgement and supplier relationships, and using savings to protect jobs elsewhere in the business. Leaders who avoid that conversation will find it happens without them.
If there is a single thread, it is that procurement orchestration succeeds when it starts with a clear North Star, a user who is better off, and a leadership team ready to move at the speed the technology now allows. The team closed the day by asking every attendee to commit to one action, one change that they will work towards solving in the last quarter of 2026.
We would welcome the chance to help turn your biggest challenge or roadblock into meaningful progress. Submit your challenge here and we’ll be in touch to work through a live demonstration. More information on ORO Studio can also be found here.