September 10
- 7:30-8.30 AM
You Choice of Morning Workshops
- A. Demystifying AI
This workshop offers a clear overview of AI capabilities and limitations within procurement, highlighting real-world examples and essential data considerations. Participants will learn how to effectively implement AI by understanding data quality, asking critical questions, and applying practical frameworks.
- Understand what AI can and cannot do in procurement contexts
- Recognize examples of effective and ineffective AI applications
- Identify common data quality issues impacting AI performance
- Know the key questions to ask when working with AI systems
- Apply the COAT framework to improve data quality
- Learn techniques for spot-checking data for issues
- Gain insights into understanding your data and leveraging AI effectively
Kimberly Dallas, Vice President, Procurement, US, Mapletree US Management
- B. Dirty Data Clinic – From Dirty to Decision-Ready Data
After 14 years of fixing dirty procurement data, Susan Walsh, The Classification Guru knows that one thing is clear: the biggest opportunities, such as savings, risk reduction, improved visibility, supplier consolidation, and better decision-making, are often hiding in your messiest data.
Most organisations are sitting on fragmented, inconsistent data spread across ERPs, emails, and SharePoint. It doesn’t just obscure savings. It increases risk, weakens supplier relationships, and limits your ability to act strategically.
What you’ll unlock (beyond savings):
- Spend visibility – See where your money is actually going across categories, suppliers, and regions
- Supplier consolidation opportunities – Identify duplicates and near-duplicates to reduce fragmentation and leverage scale
- Risk & compliance insights – Spot concentration risk, off-contract spend, and gaps in supplier data
- Stronger supplier relationships -Engage the right suppliers with a clear, consolidated view of your spend
- Faster, more confident decision-making – No more second-guessing reports or reconciling conflicting data
- Better foundations for digital procurement & AI – Because automation on messy data just scales the chaos
- Apply the COAT framework to improve data quality
Bring your mess
Bring your issues. Bring your challenges. Bring your “this data makes no sense” moments. We’ll tackle them live in a problem-solving session at the end.
Susan Walsh, Founder & MD, Classification Guru
- 8:30 AM
Main Event Registration and Coffee
- 9:15 AM
Welcome to the Event
- 9:30 AM
9.30 Opening Keynote: The CPO’s Playbook for AI-Enabled Procurement
This session explores the critical role of data as the foundation for AI solutions from a CPO’s perspective, emphasizing how organizations should prioritize data in selecting and integrating AI tools within their systems. Attendees will learn how to align senior leadership strategies with data-centric AI implementation to drive effective digital transformation.
- What the next 3–5 years will look like
- The rise of autonomous procurement
- Preparing your organization for what’s next
- Methods to enable organizational shifts toward agentic AI adoption
Stephen Day, CPO, Kantar
- 10:00 AM
Panel Discussion: Enhancing Visibility, Classification and Data Accuracy in Spend Management and in Alignment With C-Suite Objectives
This session explores how procurement leaders classify and analyze spend data to support strategic decision-making and stakeholder engagement. Attendees will learn about best practices for improving data visibility, addressing challenges related to data accuracy and consistency, and leveraging tools to make informed procurement decisions.
- Strategies for increasing visibility into vendor spend through effective tools and access
- Techniques for classifying and managing spend data to support business stakeholders
- Common challenges in ensuring data accuracy and consistency, and how to overcome them
- The role of procurement technology in enabling strategic spend analysis
- Data & spend in alignment with c-suite objectives – how procurement professionals identify and align specific procurement data points, vendor spend, etc. with c-suite goals so that both are in lock step and supportive when it comes to strategic priorities and initiatives for the overall organization
Moderator: Scarlett Wang, Senior Director, Strategic Sourcing, OUTFRONT Media
Susan Walsh, Founder & MD, Classification Guru
Tiffanie Vo-Jones, Global Indirect Category Leader, Solenis
Chelsea Walton Director of Procurement – Corp Services, HR, Aviation & BPO, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s & Bluemercury
- 10:40 AM
Coffee Break and Demos
Demo Hubs enable you to gather in groups and evaluate vendor products and services – with live demos, offering a unique opportunity to explore, compare and discover how peers might leverage the tech within their organizations.
- 11:40 AM
Keynote: Stop Policing Spend—Start Driving Power: How Procurement Leaders Turn Control into Competitive Advantage
This session exposes how procurement leaders are breaking out of the “cost police” stereotype and embedding themselves as strategic drivers of business value. Through real-world successes and failures, you’ll learn how to influence stakeholders, harness AI, and shift the conversation from budget compliance to measurable ROI.
- How to embed procurement into decision-making early by structuring governance (committees, policies, and recurring touchpoints) that actually influence outcomes, not just process
- Practical ways to handle stakeholder resistance and validate competing priorities, ensuring procurement becomes a trusted advisor rather than a blocker
- How leading CPOs align with CFOs and prove value beyond savings using data storytelling, ROI frameworks, and business-impact metrics
- Lessons from AI adoption in procurement, including failed use cases, scaling successful ideas, and creating a pipeline of innovation driven by end-users
Jay Sklar, Chief Procurement & Real Estate Officer, HUB International
- 12:10 PM
Interview: Agents on the Org Chart: How AI Is Reshaping Procurement Work
In this session, we will explore how leveraging AI can transform procurement processes, improve data quality, and enable smarter decision-making. We’ll discuss practical approaches to preparing your data for AI, building effective AI agents, and integrating these tools into your workflows to drive efficiency and strategic insights. Let’s dive into how AI can accelerate your procurement strategy and unlock new efficiencies.
- The importance of data readiness: cleaning, reducing scope, and establishing guidelines for effective AI use
- Building and deploying AI agents to automate routine tasks and improve data integrity
- How AI enables rapid pivoting and flexible automation compared to traditional RPA solutions
- Practical examples of AI in procurement: reducing manual validation time from hours to minutes
- Reshaping organizational roles: empowering humans with AI-driven virtual assistants and decision-makers
- Strategies for integrating multiple tools and workflows to maximize value and agility
Kat Devlin, Head of Procurement Operations, OpenAI
- 12:25 PM
Interview: Before the Bot - Building the Data Foundation Procurement Actually Needs
This session explores how procurement can unlock meaningful AI outcomes by first building the right data foundation, centered on a modern intake and orchestration layer integrated with core systems. It shows how structuring data, enabling self-service, and routing decisions intelligently can shift procurement from reactive support to a scalable, insight-driven function. Delegates will learn:
- Which data connections and system integrations are critical to enabling effective AI in procurement
- How to design intake and workflows that empower stakeholder self-service without losing control
- How to segment and route decisions so AI handles routine tasks while procurement focuses on strategic judgment
Alejandro Fernandez, Head of Global Procurement, Semrush
Host: Mor Cohen-Tal, CTO and Co-founder, Opstream
- 12:40 PM
Case Study 1: Making the Data Lake Ready for Agentic AI
This session looks at what it really takes to prepare a data lake for agentic AI. The focus is on practical foundations: better ingestion, better metadata, better structure, and better access. Because if the data is messy, disconnected, or poorly defined, the AI will be too. We’ll cover how to organise enterprise data so AI tools can actually use it, how to document it so outputs are interpretable, and how to support automation, reporting, and decision-making without adding more chaos.
- Ingesting and organising enterprise data for AI use cases
- Building a data dictionary that adds real business meaning, not just technical labels
- Enabling LLM tools to work across data, content, and workflows
- Improving access to insight, reporting, and operational tasks with governed AI support
Lydia Ray, Data & AI Technologist; Fortune 100 Advisor
- 12:55 PM
Case Study 2: From Cost Center to Value Creator: Aligning Procurement Data with C-Suite Priorities
This session explores how procurement professionals can effectively identify and align key data points and vendor spend with executive-level goals to ensure strategic cohesion across the organization. Attendees will learn practical approaches to foster alignment that supports organizational priorities and drives value.
- Techniques for mapping procurement data to C-suite strategic objectives
- Best practices for integrating vendor spend insights with organizational goals
- Methods to ensure procurement initiatives are aligned with overall business priorities
- Ways to communicate procurement value effectively to executive leadership
Subs Tripathy, Procurement Head- Corporate Services, Pfizer
- 1:10 PM
Lunch & Networking
- 2:00-2:50 PM
Your Choice of Workshops
A. From Spend Data to Autonomous Execution: A Best-of-Breed Approach to AI-Enabled Procurement at Scale
Most procurement AI investments fall short due to poor data foundations and fragmented execution. This session offers practical guidance for executives looking to improve data quality, unlock ROI, and build a scalable, autonomous procurement function — covering:
- How to pragmatically assess readiness and identify where to start with automation
- Strategies for keeping pace with rapid industry shifts
- Key practices of leading organisations in procurement maturity and centralisation
- Real-world case studies of companies leveraging AI and evolving their product roadmaps
- Building a robust data foundation and lessons learned from common pitfalls
Tamarin AI
B. Mastering Procurement Data Management and Monitoring
This session explores the ongoing challenges of maintaining and monitoring procurement data in a dynamic environment, emphasizing that data management is a continuous process rather than a one-time task. Attendees will learn essential strategies for sustaining clean and accurate procurement data amidst constant changes.
- Understand the challenges of maintaining procurement data amidst constant changes
- Learn strategies for ongoing monitoring and upkeep of procurement data
- Discover best practices for managing data updates, such as new suppliers and evolving information
- How do you maintain/update the data as you need to evolve?
- Explore approaches to effective data migration, digitalization, and transformation in procurement
- Gain insights into long-term data maintenance and periodic data cleanup processes
- 2:55 PM
Case study: Safeguarding Data with the Advancements of AI
This case study explores how advancements in AI have transformed data security during negotiations, emphasizing the importance of safeguarding sensitive contract information and controlling its use in AI training models. It highlights strategies for negotiating legal clauses, preventing data sharing with vendors, and leveraging contract metadata, trends, and SLAs to enhance overall data protection and compliance.
- How AI developments have impacted data security in negotiations
- Negotiating certain legal clauses in a contract that protect your data
- How to prevent its use in training AI models
- How to control important internal information getting shared with the vendor?
- Data isn’t just spend analytics but contracts contain rich metadata (how do you get them), trends (how do you measure them) and SLAs (are you enforcing them)
Holding for sponsor
- 3:20 PM
Coffee Break & Demos
- 4:25 PM
Practical Strategies for AI Enablement in Constrained Environments
This session explores how to effectively implement AI in environments that are politically, architecturally, or technically constrained. Attendees will learn pragmatic approaches to integrate AI within existing silos, improve data strategies, and navigate complex organizational challenges.
- Techniques for achieving AI integration in siloed or legacy systems
- Strategies to develop a cohesive and scalable data architecture
- Practical steps to enhance AI enablement despite political or technical constraints
- Methods for transitioning from fragmented solutions to seamless, functional AI deployments
- To bridge disparate systems, would we look at workflow tools (n8n, Zapier, Make, etc), MCPs, other solutions?
- Who should own the maintenance?
- How do you get the org to support it given that procurement tech is usually an afterthought?
Moderator: Alex Singer, Managing Director, Procurement, Hunter Point Capital
Michael Shields, Vice President of Procurement, Tropic
Aashish Patel, Global Technology Procurement Director, Grant Thornton
Eric Jacobson, Head of Procurement Enablement, Stripe
- 5:05 PM
Interview: Cultivating a Data-Driven Culture: Strategies for Engaging People and Building Organizational Commitment
Understand the importance of fostering a data-centric culture within the organization and how to address organizational challenges as a data team.
- Recognize that having the best tools and dashboards is insufficient if users routinely find workarounds or avoid using them due to time constraints.
- Learn strategies for managing the human aspect of data adoption, acknowledging that you cannot force change and that resistance may stem from lack of understanding or comfort with new processes.
- Explore methods to build a culture where employees care about the quality of their data, including emphasizing its importance and establishing clear rules.
- Discover how to create effective incentives that motivate team members to maintain data accuracy and tidiness, particularly for critical data domains like procurement data.
- Gain insights into understanding team dynamics and tailoring motivation strategies to ensure compliance and engagement with data best practices.
- In the past, any great analytics team members were tough to keep because they were so in demand. Do people partner with IT or want to have a dedicated role? With so many autonomous tools or tools that amplify the team, does that role become more important than a sourcing manager in your hiring plan?
Andrew Mussalli, Head of Strategic Sourcing & Vendor Management, SiriusPoint
- 5:35 PM