OMNEA
“Adecco’ s median intake used to take almost 23.5 days. Now it is 23 hours”
Kai Nowosel Chief Procurement Officer The Adecco Group
He is cautious, too, about over-delegating to AI during the design phase, particularly when it comes to organisational decisions that require contextual judgement rather than pattern recognition.
“ Sometimes you have to build a relationship with what the AI is telling you, and at that point the AI doesn’ t yet have a relationship with your organisation, so it gives you an interpretation that isn’ t grounded in your context.” Omnea AI brings value by building on organisational context, and proactively supporting humans in their decisions. It creates space for them to still be involved, in a more strategic way.“ The value humans add is putting AI into perspective. I still want people to think it through and relate it to what they actually do.”
What the finish line looks like Ten months in, Kai is operating less as an implementer and more as an architect, coaching a team that is increasingly running the function he set out to build. The transformation has moved from hands-on deployment to a self-sustaining model. And the ambition has grown with it.
The original business case was scoped to a defined set of spend categories. The goal now is more fundamental: routing every interaction with a third party through Omnea, regardless of category, country or spend level.“ My real dream is 100 % of everything we do with a third party starts in Omnea. 100 %. If you book travel, you still start in Omnea, you need a new car, you go into Omnea. If something is broken, you raise an Omnea request, off you go. My vision is for all spend interactions to be all in one tool.” It is an ambitious target for a business with Adecco’ s scale and complexity. But then, so was everything else Kai has described. The case for why it is achievable looks a lot like the case he made to the CFO before he took the job:
60 September 2026