DPW NYC event recap and key takeaways

Last Wednesday, June 12, DPW hosted its first North American conference in New York at NeueHouse. The event featured keynotes and discussions with a variety of procurement leaders and vendors. Below, we overview some of the sessions and give our overall impressions of the conference.

After an introduction from DPW Founder Matthias Gutzmann and CEO Herman Knevel, the first session was an interview with Scott Belsky, the Chief Strategy Officer and EVP of Design and Emerging Products at Adobe, by Mark Perera, DPW Chairman. Belsky spoke of industry AI trends and how he sees the future of work. One interesting comment he made was that “creativity is the new productivity.” By this, Belsky meant that humans have always been judged on how much we have completed. But now, with so much work being offloaded to software (and AI), people will stand out for their ideas rather than raw production.

Belsky also mentioned what he considers to be a new litmus test for technology. In his view, effective technology should take us back to the days that we long for, but with some added efficiency and/or scalability.

Another tip was Belsky’s “Four Ps” of AI advice for organizations:

• Play: novelty precedes utility, such as when Belsky’s company adopted Slack over an existing (and capable) messaging tool solely because Slack supported animated GIFs.
• Pilot the new technology.
• Protect the team from missing expectations (e.g., by adjusting KPIs).
• Provoke: ensure a culture in which people feel comfortable speaking up.

Finally, Belsky downplayed fears about AI taking jobs from most functions, instead arguing that higher ROI in an employee/department tends to lead to increased hiring (e.g., engineer hiring has gone up year-over-year for the last 20 years despite increases in productivity). He also cautioned against the commodification of LLMs and suggested working with multiple LLMs.

Next, Shachi Gupta, VP of Strategy at ORO Labs, spoke with Dr. Elouise Epstein about orchestration trends and the changing role of procurement overtime. Gupta likened orchestration to the center of a spider, arguing that it is the combination of three parts (UX, AI and API) that enables strong orchestration.

Dr. Epstein shared some strong opinions on the future of procurement tech, arguing that orchestration should overtake traditional S2P suites. She mentioned that S2P systems struggle to handle hundreds of stakeholders the way that orchestration providers can and that orchestration tends to be low-/no-code, leading to quicker and easier changes without IT involvement. Dr. Epstein also pointed out that the S2P process itself has changed — starting with sourcing, then contracting, then paying, etc. Organizations do not always operate this way, and S2P solutions cannot always support these processes out of structure.

Next, Mathew Schulz, VP of Procurement Strategy at Airbase, spoke with Christina Howlett-Perez, AVP Head of Procurement at Definitive Healthcare, and Pierre Mitchell, Spend Matters Chief Research Officer. On the topic of intake and orchestration, Mitchell opined that organizations need to go beyond just intake into external processes because tasks will still “die” in external tools. Other functions, such as IT, legal and sales, also have their own intake channels that may not mesh with a procurement-focused approach.

Mitchell argued for the augmentation of suites and ERPs with next-gen tools (such as intake/orchestration) given their emerging value. On that note, Howlett-Perez mentioned that her organization went from 0% to 78% spend under management in just six months after implementing intake and orchestration software.

David L. Rogers, an author from Columbia Business School, spoke next about evolution in digital transformation. He stated that digital transformation is actually not about technology. Instead, it is actually about process, strategy and finding new ways of working.

Rogers shared five steps to applying AI:

• Define a problem to solve (not ‘we could do X’ but ‘do X better’)
• Find the customer (internal or external)
• Validate a definition of success
• Experiment to see what works (fund small, test and learn)
• Share what you learn

Later, six breakout sessions among small groups competed for best session after each sharing their takeaways with the full conference. ORO Labs was voted for hosting the best session, ‘Building a Pathway to an AI-Powered Procurement Experience.’

After the breakouts, Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO of Zip, spoke with Guru Mohan, VP Global Procurement at Toast, and Katie Streu, Sr. Director of Strategic Sourcing at Coinbase. The trio discussed practical AI strategies. For example, Streu mentioned that Coinbase uses AI to scan contracts and color-code them by complexity. Coinbase also leverages AI-based contract redlining and legal playbooks.

Mohan outlined the need for a company AI strategy before developing an AI policy (to establish the ‘why’ first). This was notable considering how many organizations have rushed out AI policies lately but perhaps without clearly communicating a strategy for AI use first. Both Mohan and Streu highlighted the benefits of starting small with AI and gradually increasing the amount of tasks that involve it.

Next, Clive R. Heal, CEO of LavenirAi, guided the attendees through a virtual reality experience to establish the business value of the metaverse. The exercise outlined the different ways that businesses could leverage VR, even in the short term, such as via virtual assistants and supplier audits that do not require actual travel.

Finally, Tony Filippone, Chief Research Officer of HFS Research, closed by presenting statistics and summarizing the sessions. He echoed earlier sentiments about how AI and orchestration have changed the tech landscape and possibly lowered the value of S2P suites.

Overall, DPW’s first North American event was a massive success and featured an incredible amount of insightful conversations — especially on the biggest trends of the year, AI and intake/orchestration. We look forward to continuing to cover DPW’s events. DPW Amsterdam takes place on October 8-10, and you can get tickets here.