New Year Insights for the procurement solutions and services marketplace 2024: Fairmarkit

For several years now, Spend Matters has been collecting and publishing a series of articles about procurement, supply and services trends for the year ahead from expert tech and service providers in the market.

This year we’re highlighting the customer demands, market movements and advances in procurement tech that are exciting the world of solution providers, how they expect them to shape the S2P landscape next year and how they plan to respond to them.

Our series runs from mid-December to mid-January, then our senior analysts will wrap up with their own take on the key themes that emerge.

In no order of preference, other than by the date they arrived in our inbox, today let’s hear from:

Kevin Frechette, CEO of Fairmarkit, one of Spend Matters 50 providers to watch.

2023 proved to be another challenging year for procurement professionals. With the geopolitical environment continuing its downward pressure on global supply chains, the economic volatility further cemented any cost-cutting measures that were already in place. Facing internal and external pressures, CPOs are increasingly turning to technology as they seek answers to the familiar question, ‘How can we do more with less?’

Here are some trends we are seeing from our work with Fortune 500 businesses that are pushing the envelope with emerging technologies.

GenAI lessons learned

A recurring theme in our GenAI discussions with procurement leaders is the ‘war on clicks.’ In traditional sourcing or intake platforms, it seems the adoption and NPS significantly reduces the more clicks a business user needs to make. We’re actually taking this a step further and thinking about the ‘value per click’ or ‘value per keystroke.’ With GenAI, the experience needs to be more intelligent and personalized.

For example, imagine you’re looking for a fence repair. You don’t want to be prompted to input a budget or confirm a customer sub-category. You want to be asked questions about the height of the fence, length that needs repair, material of fence, color, etc. Or if you’re like me, you don’t always know what should be shared, so you ask fence companies to educate you on the process before they provide a quote.With that in mind, GenAI identifies the category, works to understand the likely location and pulls from massive data sets to predict the ballpark budget needed. All the end user sees are the relevant guided questions about the repair before receiving full visibility into and the ability to interact with into the sourcing process for that request.

Having the business user interacting with LLMs is only the first step. We’re working with customers on GenAI event creation, sourcing of upcoming renewals, policy adherence, autonomous negotiations, contract renewals, RFP scoring and supplier engagement.

A new breed of procurement solutions

When we launched KIT and our strategic sourcing solution about a month ago, we received a ton of inbound from companies outside of our ICP. We started getting hearing from companies of all sizes that wanted to explore using our Autonomous Sourcing for all types of spend. Since their procurement teams and budgets are much smaller (sometimes a team of 1), they valued:

• A GenAI/AI platform that automates a lot of the work and provides an ‘all-in-one’ for Sourcing Intake, RFQ, RFP, Reverse Auction, Supplier Enablement, and Analytics.
• A GenAI solution that would delight the business user while collecting sourcing requirements, especially when lacking strong P2P compliance. This would be a welcome alternative to traditional solutions that are quickly becoming shelfware.
• Access and ability to leverage massive datasets from global sourcing activities at enterprise scale, something which Fairmarkit is uniquely able to provide.
• Finally, a solution that can continuously iterate and scale with them as they grow into mid-to-large enterprises.

Stay tuned for additional insights as we revolutionize the way all organizations buy and sell in 2024!

Many thanks to Fairmarkit for being a part of the series. You can read our in-depth analysis of Fairmarkit’s solution here.

Read our senior analyst’s take on the key themes from the series here.

If you need to find the right procurement technology provider or service for your business needs next year, try Spend Matters TechMatch for a free rapid shortlist.

For granular analysis and comparisons of procurement technology solutions, subscribe to Spend Matters Insider.

As always, reach out to discover how Spend Matters can help with your new year commitments and wishes.