Whitepapers and research | Art of Procurement

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The Missing Layer: Rethinking Where Procurement Intelligence Comes From

Procurement has invested heavily in technology designed to capture data, improve visibility, and support better decisions. Unfortunately, some of the most valuable information about supplier relationships remains buried in emails, calls, documents, and the memories of individual team members. When that context isn't captured, procurement is left with an incomplete picture. A contract may show what was originally agreed, but not the email that changed the terms. A supplier record may contain the latest pricing, but not the conversation that explains why it increased. And when an experienced team member leaves, years of knowledge about supplier relationships and past decisions can leave with them. This Startup of the Week Briefing, informed by a conversation with Matthew Whiting, Co-Founder and CEO of Cotiss, explores procurement's persistent context problem and why capturing this missing layer of intelligence is becoming even more important as teams rely on AI to analyze information and support decisions.

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Friction Is Not a Feature: Why Supplier Risk Management Needs a Different Starting Point

Supplier onboarding has always been slow. As supplier networks expand and third-party risk requirements become more complex, the standard response has often been to add more questions, assessments, and manual reviews to the process. But more diligence does not always produce better insight. A significant amount of supplier risk information already exists across security certifications, company registrations, financial filings, operational data, and other sources. Starting with that information, rather than another lengthy questionnaire, can help procurement build a more complete picture of supplier risk while reducing friction for both sides. In this Startup of the Week Briefing, informed by a conversation with Clarence Chio, Co-Founder and CEO of Coverbase, we explore how automation is changing supplier diligence and why faster, more reliable risk assessment can help procurement become an enabler of business growth.

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Decisions Left on the Table: Why Scale is Procurement’s Most Underrated Problem

Procurement teams make prioritization decisions every day. The highest-value opportunities get attention, while countless smaller decisions are delayed, aggregated, or never made at all because there simply isn't enough time or capacity to address everything. Those missed decisions represent value that procurement may never get back. Decision intelligence offers a different approach. Rather than simply helping teams move through existing processes faster, it can analyze and surface decisions at a scale human teams cannot reach, allowing practitioners to focus their expertise where judgment and relationships matter most. This briefing, based on a conversation with Gonzalo Benedit, Chief Revenue Officer at Aera Technology, explores procurement's scale problem, what decision intelligence looks like in practice, and how organizations can increase the volume, speed, and granularity of the decisions they make without waiting for perfect data or adding an army of people.

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Simplifying Procurement at Scale with Candex

Most procurement teams dedicate their time and resources to strategic suppliers and categories, but beyond that tier sits a long tail of small, infrequent, and one-time suppliers that can create a disproportionate amount of administrative work. The transactions may be small, but the complexity isn't. Every supplier still has to be onboarded, reviewed, maintained, and paid. For global organizations, local invoicing requirements, tax rules, compliance reviews, and cross-border payments add even more complexity. Over thousands of suppliers, those requirements can consume significant procurement resources and make simple purchases unnecessarily difficult for the business. This Provider of the Week paper, informed by a conversation with Jeremy Lappin, Co-Founder and CEO of Candex, explores the hidden cost of long tail spend and how organizations can simplify these transactions while maintaining the controls, visibility, and compliance they need.

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Knowing Your Counterparty’s Counterparty: The New Standard for Supply Chain Risk

Supply chain risk management has traditionally relied on a familiar process: screen suppliers, check sanctions lists, document the results, and move on. But growing regulatory expectations, geopolitical complexity, and increasingly interconnected global supply chains are making that checklist-driven approach harder to defend. Knowing your direct supplier is no longer enough. Organizations increasingly need to understand the broader networks behind their counterparties, from ownership structures and corporate relationships to cross-border operations and other connections that may expose the business to regulatory or geopolitical risk. That requires supply chain teams to move beyond a compliance mindset and start thinking more like investigators. This briefing, created in partnership with Tesari AI and informed by a conversation with Elisar Nurmagambet, Co-Founder and CEO, and Brian Andersen, Vice President of National Security Applications, explores what this shift means for supply chain risk management and how technology can support deeper investigations while keeping critical decisions in human hands.

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The Path to Autonomous Procurement Starts with Governance

Procurement is under pressure to adopt AI quickly, experiment with new capabilities, and demonstrate value. Deploying AI in an environment where decisions carry significant financial, legal, and operational consequences requires controls that make those decisions trustworthy. Rather than adding another layer of approvals, effective AI governance establishes the guardrails and context that allow AI to operate safely and consistently. It also creates the foundation procurement will need as AI moves from supporting individual tasks to taking on autonomous, end-to-end processes. In this whitepaper, created in partnership with the team at Zip, we explore what effective AI governance looks like in procurement, what separates organizations generating real value from those stuck in pilot mode, and why the governance decisions being made today will shape procurement's ability to operate more autonomously tomorrow.

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How Agentic AI Changes the Economics of Procurement Work

Procurement has always had more work than capacity. Formal sourcing, detailed business cases, supplier analysis, and governance are often reserved for higher-value decisions, not because lower-value purchases don't deserve the same attention, but because the time and resources required simply haven't made it practical. Agentic AI can fill that gap. Procurement can evaluate more purchases, extend governance further into the business, and give more decisions the benefit of structured analysis without proportionally increasing headcount. In this whitepaper, developed in partnership with the team at Ramp, we explore how agentic AI is changing the economics of procurement work, what it means to treat agents more like new coworkers than traditional software, and how procurement can gradually delegate more responsibility as trust in the technology grows.

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Clean Enough: Why Data Intelligence + AI Is Reshaping How Teams Create Value

Better data doesn't automatically create value, but better decisions do. Spend analytics, supplier performance metrics, category insights, and dashboards are standard capabilities, but many teams still struggle to translate that data into meaningful business outcomes by making existing data more accessible, actionable, and connected to the decisions that matter most to the business. In this briefing, developed in partnership with the team at Sievo, we explore how AI and data intelligence are changing the way procurement creates value, from expanding access to insights across the business to making long-tail spend management economically viable for the first time.

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The One-Lane Road: Why Data and Execution Still Aren’t Connecting in Procurement

Procurement has more data than ever before. Market intelligence, spend analytics, supplier data, risk signals, and execution platforms have become standard components of the modern procurement technology stack. Despite the abundance of data, many organizations struggle to turn it into timely, meaningful action. The problem isn't a lack of data or technology. It's the gap between insight and execution. This briefing, informed by a conversation with Vel Dhinagaravel, CEO of Beroe, explores why procurement's traditional approach to measuring value is limiting its strategic influence and how AI is helping organizations connect intelligence, decision making, and execution to improve business competitiveness.

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From Experimentation to Spend Discipline: Managing Token-Based Spend

AI adoption is accelerating, but governance isn't quite keeping pace. As organizations embrace AI, token consumption models have introduced a new category of spend that is decentralized, usage-based, and difficult to forecast. Without the right visibility and controls, costs can escalate long before anyone understands where they're coming from or even who owns them. Procurement has an opportunity to change all that. By bringing greater visibility, governance, stakeholder collaboration, and commercial discipline to AI spend, procurement can help the business scale AI adoption without slowing innovation or experimentation. In this whitepaper, developed in partnership with the team at Tropic, we explore how procurement can build an effective AI category strategy, improve visibility into token-based consumption patterns, and create the commercial structures needed to manage one of the fastest-growing areas of technology spend.

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The Case for Group Purchasing: Collective Buying Power Changes the Indirect Spend Equation

Indirect spend often consumes more time and resources than it should. When these contracts are on autopilot, it’s ‘normal’ for suppliers to remain untouched for years, with low-priority categories rarely receiving the strategic attention they deserve. More often than not, this leads to missed savings opportunities, fragmented supplier management, and, ultimately, procurement teams stretched even thinner as they struggle to manage it all. Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) offer a different approach. By combining the purchasing power of many organizations, GPOs provide access to pre-negotiated contracts, competitive pricing, and supplier relationships that can help procurement teams move faster without sacrificing governance. In this mini-brief, developed in partnership with the team at Una, we explore how GPOs create value, what separates strategic partners from transactional providers, and how procurement leaders can determine whether a GPO is the right fit for their organization.

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Beyond the Contract: Why Supplier Management Needs a Holistic Rethink

As supplier ecosystems become more complex and business expectations continue to rise, supplier management must extend well beyond contract administration. Procurement is expected to manage risk, support regulatory compliance, improve supplier performance, inform sourcing decisions, and strengthen supplier relationships, often without the infrastructure needed to do it effectively. In this executive briefing, developed in partnership with the team at Brooklyn Solutions, we explore why traditional approaches to supplier management are no longer enough and what leading organizations are doing to build a more connected, strategic, and resilient supplier management capability. Rather than viewing supplier management as a collection of separate activities, the briefing explores how organizations can connect supplier data, contracts, risk, governance, and performance into a more cohesive operating model that enables better decision-making across the supplier lifecycle.