Recapping the last 3 (GenAI heavy) months at 40,000 ft while blasting Taylor Swift

I’m midair right now from Boston to Chicago heading to our Q3 SLT offsite (blasting Taylor Swift in my EarPods) and was just thinking “Holy S**t,” it has been a wild last 3 months. I’m guessing if you’re in the procurement world you’re feeling the same thing :)

Given that we just wrapped up our Q2 in October, I wanted to share the whirlwind of the last 3 months at Fairmarkit.

Q2 headline for the venture world: We beat our numbers while also operating more efficiently than forecasted.

More importantly, we had 15+ different customers get up and speak with or about us across conferences, podcasts, roundtables, webinars…etc. Most highlighted the work they’re doing with us across AI, GenAI, and/or how they’re partnering with us on rapid iterations from a product standpoint.  

In a fun way, this has started a somewhat competitive culture of customers wanting to innovate with us more (jam sessions) which has resulted in looking at problems differently, better understanding the holistic sourcing market, and exploring all options where AI/GenAI can provide incremental wins. The next chapter is starting to view problems from the lens of the new Agentified world (Agent = long duration task with minimum human supervision. Per Sam Altman “think of a super smart Sr Co-worker that can do 2 day tasks and ask for help when needed”).  There’s a healthy debate on whether GenAI should deliver seamless incremental value or simply WOW people and blow them away. I personally don’t think they’re polarizing views, I think the WOW should be delivering the most seamless experience possible (fully autonomous when appropriate).   

Based on all the customer calls/workshops, given we can move fast and we have the floodgates open with new ideas, the critical part is staying focused on our space = AI Sourcing.  We’ve been pushed, but we’re not building orchestration, we’re not building CLM, not building a P2P…etc. Our world is Demand-to-Award, and that’s where we’re going to be the best in the world. Given we grew up needing to leverage AI as Tail Spend and Tactical Sourcing requires high levels of intelligence to run at scale, it taught us how to keep that now AI Augmented lens when looking at Strategic Sourcing, SOW generation, Autonomous Negotiations, and Demand Intake (not orchestration). 

We love this strategy as it prevents us from being a jack of all trades, master of none (shout out to the person at DPW and our partners at Gartner who commented this), and it also means we are ALL IN on partnerships. No matter what P2P, Orchestration, Analytics, CLM…etc provider our customers use, we’re eager to integrate and partner with them to ensure the user experience stays strong.

Looking ahead, we’re taking the same approach to being flexible to different LLM models and technology partners.  In the near future, using the right model at the right time for the specific use cases is going to be best-in-class. On top of that, it needs to be flexible because the models are still changing fast.

Net-net: Our hyper focus is rapidly innovating to win sourcing. That means some Autonomous (Tail Spend and Negotiations), some a hybrid of Autonomous and AI Augmented (Tactical), and some mainly AI Augmented (Strategic).

I also wanted to recap the last 3 months of events (not fully comprehensive)

• Soar24: Our first customer event was a BLAST. Topics ranged from GenAI in Fairmarkit, to holistic GenAI education, to user adoption formulas, to best practices for sourcing across direct/indirect, international sourcing, & thinking about sourcing as more than cost savings. LFG to our long time customer Randall and BU for hosting us. Shout out to Sreedhar, David Wild and so many others.

• SAP Spend Connect: LOVE the focus on GenAI and incorporating Joule across their product line, and an exciting announcement on their Intake Management functionality coming out in Q1. Orit from Micron and our SVP Sales John Fleisher also crushed their speaking spot on GenAI adoption in procurement. 
• Amazon Business Reshape:  It’s amazing how fast Amazon Business is scaling. This event was 2 days filled with conversations about GenAI and Autonomous Sourcing, and even included a dance party on stage with Adam from Goodyear as a part of our GenAI presentation to attendees.

• DPW: Tough to describe the atmosphere in 2 sentences so I won’t try (LFG Matthias, Nick W for co-presenting, and Vanya and Anthony for sharing your Fairmarkit journey). The 2025 main focus was (of course) on GenAI, and understanding how GenAI can be leveraged across all areas within procurement.  Personally, I also got the feeling that procurement leaders are starting to try and decide “who is the right best in breed partner for each area of procurement” and then planning to really lean in and iterate over the next 3-5 years with those partners. 1 solution for Sourcing, 1 for Orchestration, CLM, Analytics, foundational P2P..etc.  From my observation, here’s the criteria they’re using: Speed of innovation/iterations, practical uses of GenAI (along with reference customer validation), and partner-first mentalities. Both with the customer and other partners = all resulting in more business value generated and a better user experience.

Looking ahead, I can honestly say I’ve never been more fired up about the next 6 months ahead at Fairmarkit and within procurement. 

PS: Victor and I did an “Incremental Progress in Procurement Using AI and GenAI” webinar last month and received tons of interest in hearing from more people about GenAI in procurement. Watch now: