Tell us about your role with The AA I head up third-party risk and procurement operations at the AA. For those that don’ t know, we go beyond breakdown and roadside recovery, with a number of financial products and insurance. We’ re financially regulated, so that factors in quite heavily when we’ re talking about risk. I come from a procurement transformation and finance background at big FMCG global companies, but I’ ve spent the last two years working at The AA on their digital transformation journey and implementing a greenfield procurement operations and risk practice.

What do The AA’ s procurement activities look like? It’ s all indirect. The biggest thing we focus on is across IT, marketing, corporate services – the contingent labour you’ ll have at most organisations. But then what’ s closer to the product is the purchase of our yellow vans and the garaging network of a few thousands suppliers. We’ ve got a big focus as an organisation on moving to strategic partners, with a much bigger focus on supplier relationship management, rather than the traditional tendering activity.

What were the key topics discussed in your panel session on finance and spend? One was around how people need to change their skillsets. Any big technology change always has a knock-on effect on the skills you need – I talk about AI literacy. You’ ve got off-the-shelf solutions that you can buy in like a contract management solution that has agentic AI, where you drive adoption as part of your rollout. But then you’ ve got solutions like ChatGPT and Copilot that impact every aspect of someone’ s day, and that’ s where you need continuous growth and the right mindset from individuals to adopt it. Those who don’ t will end up being less competitive in the short term.

How do you approach change management when introducing AI tools? I’ m a big fan of champions or super users – people embedded in the teams that are more digitally savvy that can help uplift the rest of the team. But it’ s also about the constant drumbeat, continually talking around AI, how it’ s going to be used, how it will impact people’ s roles and the skills they need to have. That’ s how we try to get people ready for the change.

procurementmag. com 79