Ivalua NOW EMEA 2025: ‘Innovate to Elevate’

Ivalua NOW EMEA 2025 took place earlier this week, March 11-12, at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, bringing together procurement, supply chain and finance professionals under the theme ‘Innovate to Elevate.’ The event served as a platform for industry leaders to explore how emerging technologies and new strategies are shaping procurement’s future amid ongoing market challenges.

The agenda reflected the evolving priorities in procurement and supply chain management. It focused on digital transformation, with discussions centered on the role of AI in procurement and improving decision making through data-driven insights. It also covered broader strategic concerns, including sustainability, risk management and the need for greater agility in supply chains.

One notable aspect of the event was that it marked the first Ivalua NOW since the company’s leadership transition earlier this year. David Khuat-Duy, Ivalua’s founder and former CEO, stepped into a new role as Chief AI Officer. Franck Lheureux, previously Chief Revenue Officer, took over as CEO. This shift underscored Ivalua’s focus on accelerating AI-driven innovation within its platform, a theme that resonated throughout the event’s discussions.

The CEO keynote provided a business update highlighting the strong business momentum the company has had in 2024, reporting $200 million in revenue (vs. $180 million in 2023). The number of employees passed the bar of 1,000, and the number of Ivalua-certified people also increased to 4,600 (this figure includes partners and employees).

The mid-market segment continued to gain traction, now representing a large portion of Ivalua’s customers, spanning organizations with revenues between $500 million and $5 billion and smaller. Strong demand was particularly evident in aerospace and defense, retail, automotive and energy, reinforcing the platform’s growing appeal across multiple industries.

The agenda also included an AI keynote that covered Ivalua’s long-term vision for an agentic AI-driven future. The company emphasized its commitment to leveraging AI across the platform to enhance efficiency, improve decision making and automate complex workflows while maintaining the high configurability that defines its solution. 

A significant milestone in this journey is Ivalua’s v10. This upcoming platform version will serve as the first step toward agentic AI, building on the historical AI and GenAI implementations in the solution (the first generation was introduced in H2 2023 with, for example, the use of GenAI for its chatbot, IVA). This release will introduce foundational AI-driven capabilities designed to augment procurement teams with intelligent automation, paving the way for even more autonomous agent-based functionalities in future iterations. The approach relies on specialized AI agents and orchestrator AI agents:

• Specialized AI agents are designed for specific procurement tasks, such as supplier risk assessment, contract compliance monitoring, spend classification and ESG tracking. These agents will continuously learn from data inputs, identifying patterns and offering proactive recommendations to procurement teams.
• AI orchestrator agents will take a more advanced role, acting as intelligent coordinators integrating multiple specialized agents to orchestrate end-to-end procurement workflows.

As part of this evolution, Ivalua is prioritizing responsible AI implementation, ensuring that it enhances procurement professionals’ decision making rather than replacing it. The company also stressed the importance of continuous learning and how internal AI adoption can serve that purpose (Khuat-Duy highlighted that his role as Chief AI Officer also includes the development of internal AI applications for R&D, customer support and more).

Beyond the agentic-AI vision and roadmap we mentioned, the event showcased several innovations to the current (or soon-to-come) version of Ivalua:

• Multi-channel intake management with conversational capabilities in Ivalua or in other communication apps (MS Teams for example).
• Supplier collaboration through email and AI for, potentially, autonomous interactions (e.g., supplier queries) to streamline further processes like onboarding and daily communications.
• Autonomous sourcing capabilities that will allow customers to configure semi- or fully-automated RFxs with the solution being able to perform or provide recommendations for several steps like supplier selection, quote analysis, and award.
• Advanced contract intelligence focusing on risk with the AI scanning contracts for certain risks with the ability to recommend mitigation actions (based on a customer’s playbook or broader considerations). These capabilities can be delivered in Ivalua or in MS Word with a deeper MS Word integration that allows users to use IVA in MS Word to chat with contracts to get recommendations or insights.
• Travel and expenses management with several enhancements to allow users to pay with virtual cards and claim expenses via the mobile version, which includes capabilities to scan receipts and have immediate compliance checks based on, for example, internal policies that have been read and processed by the AI (instead of having to configure these rules).
• External workforce management with a module that has been entirely rewritten to offer stronger capabilities to manage a pool of external resources/talent from the discovery/search to the delivery tracking.

For our North American readers, the upcoming Ivalua NOW Americas event is set to take place on May 21-22, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana.