Event Agenda

Direct Procurement LEADERSHIP Summit - Day 1

Day 1

Arrival, Check-in & Networking

Day 1

Morning Workshop

Data Foundations for Building the Digital Procurement Organization

A practical maturity workshop on making procurement data usable, trusted and connected before scaling AI. The session will cover data quality, supplier and material master data, workflow discipline, ERP and procurement system integration, ownership models, governance and the guardrails needed for high-stakes sourcing decisions.

Day 1

Welcome and Main Event Kick-Off

Day 1

AI as an Amplifier: Why Procurement Needs Better Processes Before Better Tools

Scott will explore why AI cannot compensate for poor process design – AI will accelerate and amplify existing workflows, which means organizations must address bottlenecks, governance and human decision-making before expecting meaningful ROI. For procurement leaders, this creates a timely discussion around operating models, sourcing workflows and decision rights.

  • AI does not automatically fix dysfunction
  • Automating a poor process can make the problem worse
  • AI shifts bottlenecks rather than removing them
  • The human judgment point often becomes the new constraint
  • Procurement teams need to redesign workflows around trust, control and decision-making

Scott Weiner, AI Lead, Fractional CTO, Fractional Chief AI Officer, Business Agility Strategist, NeuEon

Day 1

What Your ERP Can't See: The Market Signals Driving Margin, Risk, and Production Continuity

Your ERP is very good at telling you what you paid last quarter. It’s far less helpful at telling you what you’re about to pay—or whether the materials you’re counting on will actually arrive on schedule. That gap is where margin quietly disappears. Direct materials leaders today are managing tariff whiplash, supplier concentration, critical-input exposure, and executives who want forecasts to the decimal point—while still making sourcing decisions off backward-looking data and contracts that were “set and forget” the day they were signed. More automation won’t fix that. Automating a blind process just gets you to the wrong answer faster.

What changes the game is a market-informed operating model: historical price intelligence, volatility signals, forward-looking forecasts, and AI that actually interprets what the market is telling you. Used together, they surface the exposure hiding in your bill of materials, flag disruptions before they become line-down events, and let you lock in price certainty instead of hoping for it. Whether you’re buying metals, resins, electronics, packaging, or chemicals, the principle is the same.

This isn’t a cost-cutting pitch. It’s about continuity you can trust, forecasts you can defend, and margin that stops leaking out the back door.

If you’re still managing volatility by reacting to it, this session is for you.

Lisa Reisman, CEO, MetalMiner

Day 1

Coffee Break + Demo Hubs

Demo Hubs enable you to gather in packs and evaluate our vendors’ products and services – with live group demos, offering a unique opportunity to benchmark, critique and compare how peers might leverage the tech within their organizations.

Day 1

Digital Transformation Blueprint: How Ready is Your Architecture?

  • This session will examine the sequence required to build a modern direct procurement function: data quality, supplier and material visibility, system integration, process discipline, analytics, AI-enabled decision support, and stronger influence across supply chain, finance, operations, product and commercial planning

Shashi Mandapaty, Former CPO, J&J

Day 1

Transformation Case Study Interviews

What Good Looks Like: The AI Performance Advantage in Direct Procurement

  • Practitioner-led case study showing where technology is already improving sourcing, supplier performance, quote management, risk visibility, inventory decisions, supplier collaboration and everyday productivity
  • What we automated first: practical use cases direct procurement can steal

Day 1

Networking Lunch

Day 1

Breakout Tracks Commence

Day 1

Track 1 - Supply Intelligence Track

Day 1

Track 2 – Cost & Demand Track

Day 1

Regroup Over Coffee

Day 1

Roundtables

  1. Are you in negotiation with an AI vendor right now? Let’s make it better…
  2. Managing contract manufacturers with ai-enabled supplier intelligence
  3. AI-powered commodity and market intelligence – Lisa Reisman?
  4. BOM visibility and hidden supplier risk – Ian Silver?
  5. Supplier consolidation tactics
  6. Sustainability that pays: linking carbon, cost and supply design
  7. Building the Intelligent Supply Network -from fragmented data and manual workflows to structured procurement, collaborative supplier management and AI-enabled decisioning across direct spend, supplier risk, sourcing, quality and continuity 

Day 1

Practitioner Case Study: Supplier Innovation as a Growth Engine

  • How procurement can unlock expertise hidden in the supply base by moving beyond transactional RFPs and creating supplier-led innovation conversations that improve cost, quality, sustainability, manufacturability and speed to market

Tim Riordan, Director of Procurement Americas, WIKA Group

Day 1

Our AI Transformation Journey

  • Defining how the organizational structure, governance model and talent profile looks in an AI-enabled procurement function
  • The Human-AI partnership (not replacement)
  • Playbook for AI adoption: How leaders are structuring teams, data, governance, and supplier engagement

Day 1

Close of Day One & Drinks

Direct Procurement LEADERSHIP Summit - Day 2

Day 2

Arrival, Breakfast & Networking

Day 2

Morning Workshop

Build, Buy or Integrate: Choosing the Right AI Architecture for Direct Procurement

  • ERP limitations
  • Procurement suites vs point solutions
  • Internal copilots
  • Data lakes and supplier data platforms
  • Integration with PLM, MES, ERP and planning tools
  • What should sit inside procurement vs IT vs operations

 

Day 2

Welcome to Day Two

Day 2

Beyond the Pilot: What Actually Happens When AI Lands in Your Procurement Organization

This session looks at what actually happens once the AI tool is introduced into the day-to-day work of procurement teams: where it earned trust, where adoption stalled, what changed in practice, and what had to be adjusted along the way. What it took to move from “we bought this” to “this is now how we work.”

  • What was the original use case that justified the investment, and was it the one that ultimately stuck?
  • How did the team respond in month one vs. month six?
  • Where did adoption stall, and what helped move it forward?
  • What impact looked like in practice: time saved, spend influenced, decisions changed, or work reallocated
  • Tracking impact
  • The honest gap between what the vendor promised and what the tool delivers day to day?
  • What would I do differently if rolling this out again?

Day 2

Talent & Organization - The 2030 Direct Procurement Leader

  • Skills, structures, COE gap
  • From “CPO” to “Chief Value Officer”

Omer Abdullah, Founder, Proquria 

Day 2

Coffee Break + Demo Hubs

Demo Hubs enable you to gather in packs and evaluate our vendors’ products and services – with live group demos, offering a unique opportunity to benchmark, critique and compare how peers might leverage the tech within their organizations.

Day 2

Breakout Tracks Commence

Day 2

Track 1 - Supply Intellgence Track

Day 2

Track 2 – Cost & Demand Track

Day 2

Networking Lunch

Day 2

Choice of Workshops

Day 2

Human Adoption & Change Readiness

The hardest part of AI adoption is getting people, teams, suppliers, IT, legal, security, and leadership aligned enough to use it with confidence. This wrap-up panel focuses on the human side of AI transformation in procurement: how to prepare the organization, reduce resistance, build trust, and move from isolated experimentation to embedded ways of working.

  • Why pilots fail even when the technology performs well
  • How to identify and address stakeholder resistance early
  • What category managers need in order to feel confident using AI
  • How to train teams without overwhelming them or reducing adoption to a one-off workshop
  • How to bring suppliers into AI-enabled procurement processes
  • What IT, security, legal, and data teams need before they will approve wider rollout
  • How to move from experimentation to embedded workflows
  • How to measure adoption, confidence, behaviour change, and usage, not just ROI
  • What leaders should do on Monday morning to build change readiness

Day 2

Wrap-Up and Close of Summit

Thank you for joining us!

Testimonials

WHAT DO PAST ATTENDEES THINK OF THE EVENT?

    "It was an awesome gathering. Never been around so many IT Procurement Professionals from the buy side that shared best practices."

      "What a great opportunity to meet, engage, and learn both from and with Procurement colleagues from a wide range of backgrounds!"

        "An exceptionally valuable event; speakers and breakout sessions were exceptional and the hallway conversations alone were worth multiples of the cost."

          "It was an amazing conference and I’ve already been able to successfully put some of the negotiation tips and tricks into use. Thank you!"

            "The concentration of specialized expertise and experience was overwhelming, so much to learn from those in the room. I can’t wait to dive in again next year!"