Empowering Procurement with AI

Empowering procurement with AI makes efficiency, cost savings and speed with compliance achievable. With such proven results, business leaders are now asking themselves how to incorporate AI into their operations and which AI-based platforms will produce the results their organization needs. Globality Vice President of Business Development Doug Halka joins host Bruce Morton to discuss how their AI-built platform GLO is impacting services procurement and changing the way work gets done.

Bruce Morton: You've mentioned that AI is getting traction at the board level. Can you share more about that?

Doug Halka: We are seeing greater interest across our customers, almost every one of them. We had one large financial institution where their CEO attended the CEO Roundtable with other leaders in the tech industry. These tech leaders were saying, basically, "You've got to get on board with AI because it's coming and it's real, it's going to affect your business." This CEO came back and brought her leadership team together and looked at every person in the room and said, "What's your AI strategy? How are you going to use it going forward?"

Our CPO raised their hand and he said, "I've been using AI for over a year now." She was amazed that it had been deployed. He started talking about the benefits and how they were getting 20% savings. They were saving 50% man-hours, and they were getting reduced cycle times of up to 80%, which means the business was getting what they need faster with less effort from procurement. That has really elevated his role within that organization. It's put him in a positive spotlight. He's now having weekly or biweekly debriefs with the CEO on the results and how the AI is being deployed and things like that.

Bruce Morton: Let's look at the other end of the spectrum here, the human end versus generative AI. What do you see in terms of its impact on humans, particularly in the areas of procurement?

Doug Halka: There's this fear out there that AI is going to eliminate the need for people. We're not seeing that come to fruition. We're seeing the exact opposite. We're seeing what it's really doing is allowing humans to be more human and interact with other humans. What the AI is doing is it's really automating and eliminating time-consuming, laborious tasks, such as identifying suppliers.

On our platform, comparing proposals side-by-side, creating that side-by-side comparison that typically can take anywhere from 20 to 40 hours for a person to copy and paste stuff out of different documents into one and highlight.

Again, that's not necessarily fun work. It's time-consuming work, and it's often done by very valuable resources, but it's not adding value to the organization.

By using AI to automate a lot of this, now people are elevating their role to working with other people to figure out, now this platform is showing us likenesses and differences between these suppliers. Let's talk about how we evaluate them. Let's talk about the credentials. Let's talk about which of these suppliers you want to work with and why. On the backend, it's like, what's our negotiation strategy? Procurement's now working with the business stakeholder to figure out what's really important to you and how can we expedite this negotiation process to get these people working on your project sooner? Again, we don't see AI as a threat. We see AI as an enabler for people to do more and to focus more on those human interactions, which AI isn't really good at. AI doesn't form a bond. It's just automating these tasks.

Bruce Morton: I like to say stop getting your humans to do jobs of robots. It's not the robots are taking our jobs, it's they're doing what they should be doing. What are some of the real tangible results your clients are seeing by using the tool?

Doug Halka: Generally speaking, we're seeing an increase in spend under management. What that does is it obviously leads to savings, leads to compliance to convert supplier lists, it reduces risk in the organization because [you’re] buying from suppliers that you know, and you trust. You're also getting SOWs that are measurable so you can hold suppliers accountable to outputs and outcomes, versus just giving them open-ended ability to work on a time and materials basis with no end in sight.

Measurably speaking, we're seeing savings in the 20% range. We're being told by most of our procurement leaders that they're seeing about a doubling of their procurement's team ability to do work, meaning they're managing about double the number of events with Globality than they were before Globality. I talked earlier about cycle times, which is an important one because when you reduce cycle times, you're giving the business confidence that running a compliant process doesn't slow them down from doing what they need to do. Seeing that cycle time reduction of up to 80% is now enabling the business to move at pace while reducing risk for the business and generating savings in the process.

Listen to Full Interview