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

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 Lalitha Rajagopalan, Co-founder and Head of Product Strategy and Marketing at ORO Labs.

GenAI will become more strategic, pervasive and transparent

GenAI will enter what Gartner calls the ‘trough of disillusionment,’ with organizations expecting measurable impact on business process efficiency. Low-hanging fruit like chatbots and auto-summarization features will become commonplace, and vendors will be under increased pressure to innovate using large language models (LLMs) in ways that clearly demonstrate business value. In procurement, this means moving beyond chatbots to high-value uses of AI that provide hyper-personalized intake and onboarding experiences for procurement professionals, requestors and suppliers.

Organizations that move past the AI marketing hype will be best positioned to partner with vendors to build innovative, high-impact GenAI capabilities. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 20% of brands will lean into positioning and differentiation based on the absence of AI in their products, so we will see more GenAI-powered features applied transparently — improving user experiences without touting that GenAI is being used.

Orchestration tools will begin to see widespread adoption

In 2024, budgetary constraints will lead procurement departments to make orchestration a priority. By focusing on orchestration — the ability to synchronize interdependent procurement teams, systems and processes — procurement leaders will see improvements in operations efficiency as well as benefits in the management of cost, teams, risk and sustainability as a matter of course.

Procurement departments will come to realize that this is a critical shift in mindset – away from discrete systems (whether suites or specialized solutions) and toward unified experiences. Unified experiences are not only faster and less expensive, but also address fundamental issues of user adoption, operational efficiency, agility and data integrity in ways that discrete systems thinking alone cannot.

In an AI world, human experiences will take center stage

According to research from Gartner, only 14% of procurement leaders have adequate talent to meet their future needs. To address these talent shortages, leaders must consider how today’s technology decisions impact their ability to hire, train and retain talent in the future.

Procurement leaders who invest in AI-powered orchestration solutions that provide unified, intuitive, and hyper-personalized procurement experiences for every stakeholder – from procurement professionals to requestors to suppliers – can avoid the high cost of ripping and replacing their existing systems and benefit in a wide range of areas.

For example, the right orchestration solution can help procurement leaders onboard new employees without lengthy training, and retention rates may improve as frustration with legacy systems is replaced with delightful experiences tuned to worker expectations. And, because it’s possible to create and update processes without coding knowledge, leaders can improve agility based on future needs, challenges and stakeholder expectations.

Many thanks to ORO Labs for being a part of the series.

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.

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