Ivalua NOW EMEA 2024: Procurement [RE]Imagined

Last week, Spend Matters attended Ivalua’s annual EMEA conference in Paris.

Like every year (except during the peak of Covid when the event was 100% virtual), Ivalua selected a prestigious location: Versailles. The event was held at the Palais des Congrès in Versailles, just a few meters from the Palace of Versailles.

Titled ‘Procurement [RE]Imagined,’ this two-day event explored how new technologies enable procurement to do previously impossible things. Procurement can ‘reinvent’ itself to meet growing complexities and need for performance.

Day one — which Spend Matters did not attend as it was for customers and partners only — consisted of solution-focused sessions covering various topics: AI and generative AI, risk management, external workforce management, etc.

Day two included more than 20 internal and external speakers, practical cases and presentations, offering attendees ample opportunities to learn and network. Main stage and breakout sessions delved into strategies related to digitalization, sustainability, risk and more.

Overview of Day 2 at Ivalua NOW

David Khuat-Duy, Ivalua’s CEO and founder, kicked off the event with a company update. Ivalua now has 950 employees (vs. 900 last year), a revenue of >$180 million in 2023 (vs. $153 million the previous year) and 2,000+ certified consultants (vs. 1,500 last year).

David then focused on a topic that was the focus of the event: generative AI — more specifically, how Ivalua approached the implementation of GenAI in its platform.

The system is designed to be LLM-independent, affording users the flexibility to interchange between third-party LLMs, such as OpenAI and Anthropic. IT can leverage the proprietary Ivalua LLM that is expected to be available later this year or LLMs that each customer could build (and probably someday will).

The GenAI capabilities are highly configurable and data-model aware, enabling customers to build chatbots and address diverse use cases by tailoring the capabilities to their unique specifications. GenAI is delivered in the user interface via Ivalua’s chatbot (IVA), but it can also be embedded in the application through the configurability of the solution (design mode) that enables integrators and customers to design buttons and actions that create requests to the GenAI engine, combining data from the screen and the overall application.

He also announced the availability of Ivalua’s add-on store through which customers can access and share pre-packaged configurations (templates, workflows, GenAI use cases, etc.). Until the event, the add-on store was only used internally by Ivalua’s teams. Now, customers can use it to share configurations within their organizations or the broader community (after a review/certification process by Ivalua). Ivalua will also use the add-on store to push configurations to customers.

For example, it currently hosts nine GenAI use cases that customers can directly install and use covering, including:

• Supplier research and creation to help find and gather relevant information on existing or new suppliers and their offerings.
• Enhanced communications to generate content for mass email communication to suppliers.
• Category and market insights to conduct market research for categories with impact assessment and recommended actions.
• Generate improvement plans to review assessments and suggest appropriate actions to create the basis of a structured improvement plan.
• Chat with documents to pull relevant data and insights from documents, contracts or invoices.
• Legal assistant to summarize contracts and highlight risks for approval or help draft clause language based on instructions.

Ivalua will regularly enrich the add-on store, including the library of GenAI skills, with additional ones. 15 have already been identified, and several were shown during the event.

Beyond GenAI and the add-on store which are both already available to customers, Pascal Bensoussan (Chief Product Officer) highlighted the key priorities for the future releases of Ivalua. These include enhancing several existing capabilities (e.g., AI in CLM, direct sourcing and so on), the upcoming launch of a module dedicated to external workforce management (beyond the current SoW capabilities of the solution) and a GenAI-backed intake module.

Other main stage presentations and breakout sessions focused on the less technical aspects of generative AI.

ArcelorMittal, a customer that had early access to GenAI capabilities, presented how it built its GenAI roadmap and shared some lessons from its pilots with the use cases mentioned above.

A panel discussion on the main stage went deeper into some considerations related to generative AI and its use in procurement. The panel was led by Dr. Natacha Tréhan, a renowned academic in procurement, and included Joël Aznar (President of Exqi, a think-tank dedicated to data quality management, and Data Risk Director at Schneider Electric), Guillaume Duny (Head of Procurement at Crédit Agricole, a bank), Frédéric Forster (a leading lawyer specialized in Data Protection at Lexing Alain Bensoussan) and Pascal Bensoussan from Ivalua. The session explored the various use cases of generative AI in procurement, shedding light on best practices and strategies to maximize its potential and address risks.

The afternoon was packed with other breakout sessions delivered by Ivalua’s team, partners and customers. The topics were related to change management, sustainable procurement, risk management, digital transformation and sustainable procurement.

Regarding sustainability, the last customer presentation on the main stage was delivered by Northvolt. It showcased how its procurement team contributed and continues to contribute to creating and managing a sustainable and resilient supply chain in the battery industry, a sector in growth but faced with challenges related to, among other things, raw materials and carbon emissions.

The event’s closing party took participants on a private tour of the Palace of Versailles.

With Ivalua NOW EMEA behind us, its sister Americas event is scheduled for May 22-23 at the Faena Forum in Miami Beach, Florida, USA.