PROCUREMENT TECHNOLOGY
Kandyss Watson, Senior Manager Supply Chain Centre of Excellence, Delta Air Lines
What are your key takeaways from this event? I think it’ s been a great collaboration between the customers and Zycus, really focusing on AI. That’ s the focus of this conference, which I think is very important because AI is where procurement is going today.
What I’ ve taken away is the fact that AI is something that can be embraced by procurement organisations and how we can get that in front of more of our business stakeholders – and figure out how we incorporate that technology into what we do to help improve our processes.
You work closely with Zycus. Can you speak about that partnership and how it works? We’ ve been a customer of Zycus for a few years and we are actually really focused on the source-to-contract part of the procure-to-pay process. It’ s been a great partnership so far. We’ ve really embedded the technology into our source-to-pay processes around project management, intake management and contract management, as well as our sourcing events – so, our e-sourcing as well.
The collaboration has been really great as we know different companies have different needs. Zycus has been very much open to taking a lot of our feedback on the product and how to make sure it fits for what we do at Delta.
You were on stage here to talk about agentic AI. What was your message? The focus on agentic AI is really profound in that most organisations really are trying to find ways to be more strategic in what they do.
As we know, there’ s various pressures from an economic basis as well as wanting to do more. Agentic AI, we feel, is definitely a step in that direction.
It’ s about making sure our sourcing teams are focused on the strategic value-add activities versus those things that may be more transactional from a tactical perspective. It’ s finding ways to have AI agents or agentic AI facilitate that process – say the information gathering or the creating of events or the execution of contracts.
Agentic AI can be a partner with the sourcing manager so they can spend time doing the value-add activities such as conversations with stakeholders and vendors.
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