INTAKE & ORCHESTRATION

I think it ' s probably fair to say, focusing on category management, that the old way has sort of been left behind for obvious reasons – you know, the new technologies at our disposal. Was there a moment in your career where you thought there has to be a faster, more intelligent way to do this? I started my career in procurement, and part of my role within that organisation was: how can we accelerate our scale? How can we really drive more value through leveraging technology? My specific focus was on category management, and looking at what I ' d say was a very dated process of using a really nice PowerPoint deck that we had built over the years to build category strategies. Ultimately, we found this very small start-up called Sirion that was digitising the process – not only to help us build better category strategies, but to help us as an organisation really standardise and streamline the approach. And just as a user of the tool, I also got to see, wow, this is super powerful. I love where the technology is going, and that ' s actually ultimately what led me to quitting my job, joining Sirion, starting their US company, and really being the first person out there in the market advocating for this change – that there ' s technology out there that can help organisations drive value at scale.

So, one thing I ' m really intrigued by, Andrew, is how we balance the need for global standardisation with the fact that every category behaves so differently. Can AI help bridge that gap? What we ' re able to do with the AI, the technology, and combining it with human intelligence, is drive organisations through a process that delivers standardisation at scale. They ' re inputting information into the tool that ' s specific to them, so the AI, following that framework, can actually make recommendations and give them insights based on the data that they put into the tool. So it ' s always custom and tailored to their specific use case.

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