What are your key takeaways from Zycus Horizon? I think the Horizon event is really cool in the fact that it brings together many parts of the procurement ecosystem. It’ s where people can describe experiences they’ ve had with and without Zycus and also give exposure to some of Zycus’ new products as they’ re coming out.

You’ re working closely with Zycus on a project called Tailwinds. Can you tell us about that? IBM comes from a services perspective and Zycus a technology platform view. We put them together and have an offering that’ s called Tailwinds that’ s managing tail spend to drive savings.

We’ ve been doing procurement operations for 20-plus years and manage US $ 420bn of spend. So, we bring all of that expertise – the category expertise, the sourcing expertise.

Zycus brings its platform, which includes the agentic AI-enabled intake and the orchestration layer, which has the triage engine built in and the autonomous sourcing platform. We are really building a full-on workflow that manages tail spend, building in all the knowledge and the know-how together with IBM and running that for clients to deliver savings.

Kuntha Chelvanathan, Global Intelligent Procurement Operations Leader IBM

What role is agentic AI playing both in procurement generally and in your partnership with Zycus? This solution cannot exist without the role of agentic AI because, if you want to drive users to use it, you need a very friendly user interface and you need it to be intuitive. And agentic AI enables that.

The whole intake and the triage mechanism where the policies, the processes, the workflows are all built into the platform – that’ s all run by agentic AI. Without that, we won’ t get the adoption and the user experience that we need to get to drive the savings.

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