FINANCE & SPEND
We’ ve been working with Sony for a few years now. They have a broad supplier network for production equipment and have a need for localised sourcing. By embedding AI across their workflows, they’ ve significantly accelerated delivery, nearly halved contract cycles and their sourcing timelines are now averaging around eight weeks. Procurement is now positioned as a strategic advisor.
When customers come to Amazon Business, what they’ re looking for is that simplification. And because we have a very broad supplier base, we can absorb a lot of those disruptions. Many CPOs have told us this year that supply chain resilience is one of their top priorities for the next one to two years, with AI as the second. Amazon Business is really bringing all of that to them.
Amazon Business is known for moving fast and scaling big projects. What is your best advice to procurement leaders who want to digitise their legacy systems quickly without breaking compliance? First, I don’ t think you have to do it all at once – it can be a phased approach. You should start with visibility. Data is king. Creating that visibility and transparency with easy, real-time dashboards – such as Amazon Business Analytics – is the first step. The second is to identify those manual, repetitive tasks so that you can automate them. The third is really more of a mindset shift.
Consider that procurement is no longer just cost avoidance; it’ s far more than that – it is a strategic driver. The mindset matters because it will drive this journey and ensure you don’ t have to compromise between all those priorities. You can have it all, really, with the right features and the right mindset. Adopt the tools we are developing with our customers – not just for them, but with them – to help with transparency, agility and resilience, and to make business buying smarter.
And finally, Céline, what would you say is the North Star guiding you and your team as we move through the rest of 2026 and into 2027? The North Star is really to make purchasing completely seamless while fully serving our customers’ values. We started this discussion with responsible purchasing. We covered all the complexities they have to manage, and what we are striving for is to bring all of that into one place and provide customers with tools that are easy to adopt and truly embedded into what they’ re doing today. We want to make procurement easier, more intelligent and more strategic so that teams spend less time on process and more time on the decisions that drive the business forward.
We’ ll keep innovating and use every advance to help customers in their procurement journey.
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