In almost every customer meeting now I get the same question (or some slight variation):
“What’s new with the GenAI stuff?”
“Learn anything exciting about GenAI lately?”
“How are other customers using it?”
What we’re learning
At Fairmarkit, we’ve had 100s of business users leveraging GenAI to share requirements for sourcing. While it’s quite helpful that we built it with procurement, we understand that this doesn’t grant us a golden ticket to success. Our native ‘GenAI first’ approach allows us to learn from customer input and make adjustments on a weekly basis, and this has allowed us to iterate at an incredible pace and track user adoption in real time.
A key theme that keeps coming up is the idea of a “War on Clicks.” In traditional sourcing or intake platforms, it seems the adoption and NPS significantly goes down the more clicks a business user needs to make. We’re actually taking this a step further and thinking about the “Value per Click” or “value per keystroke”. With GenAI, the experience needs to be more intelligent and personalized - just like autocomplete today reduces the number of characters to type an email or search for something. We’re building a world where your next sourcing event requires far less effort in terms of form fills, choosing from drop-downs, clicks and so on.
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To make this real, an example is someone looking for a fence repair. They don’t want to be prompted to input a budget or confirm a customer sub-category. Just as you would at your house, you’d want to be asked questions about the height of the fence, length that needs repair, material of fence, color, etc. Or if you’re like me, you don’t always know what should be shared, so you ask fence companies to educate you on the process before they provide a quote.
With that in mind, GenAI identifies the category, works to understand the likely location, and pulls from massive data sets to predict the ballpark budget needed. All the end user sees are the relevant guided questions about the repair and then full visibility and interaction into the sourcing process for that request.
Having the business user interacting with LLM’s is only the first step, we’re working with customers on GenAI event creation, sourcing of upcoming renewals, policy adherence, autonomous negotiations, contract renewals, RFP scoring, and supplier engagement.
Discoveries made along the way
When we launched KIT and our strategic sourcing solution about a month ago, we received a ton of inbound from companies outside of our ICP (ideal customer profile = which to-date has been mid-to-large Enterprises). We started hearing from companies of all sizes that wanted to explore using our Autonomous Sourcing for all types of spend. Since their procurement teams and budgets are much smaller (sometimes a team of 1), they valued:
- A GenAI/AI platform that automates a lot of the work and provides an “all-in-one” for Sourcing Intake, RFQ, RFP, Reverse Auction, Supplier Enablement, and Analytics.
- A GenAI solution that would delight the business user while collecting sourcing requirements, especially when lacking strong P2P compliance. This would be a welcome alternative to traditional solutions that are quickly becoming shelfware.
- Access and ability to leverage massive datasets from global sourcing activities at enterprise scale, something which Fairmarkit is uniquely able to provide.
- Finally, a solution that can continuously iterate and scale with them as they grow into mid to large enterprises.
Personally, that final point about continuous iteration is the most important. If a company invests in a SaaS solution that will look similar and provide similar value in 2027 as it did in 2024, then I’d advise you to run for the hills.
Takeaways and next steps
We’re currently working on an offering for companies between $100M-$1B in revenue. The priorities are
1) AI first
2) Simplicity
As we continue charging forward to become the #1 AI Sourcing Solution globally, we need to continue promoting and hiring best in class leaders who can help us on this journey. On that note, I’m thrilled to welcome our new SVP of Sales John Fleisher and our new SVP of Customer Success Dean Thomas.
