Ivalua NOW 2025: Interview with Deloitte's Brent Griffith

Ivalua NOW 2025 brought together some of the world's foremost procurement and supply chain professionals, gathered to share insights, advance innovation and exchange success strategies. 

Held at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans on 21-22 May and hosted by Ivalua, the event focused on key themes driving procurement transformation including AI, strategic agility and the importance of partnerships and collaboration. 

These are at the heart of an ongoing partnership between Ivalua, the leading AI-powered cloud-based spend management company, and global consulting firm Deloitte. Together, the pair work with industry leaders to implement complex and technology-driven transformation programmes. 

Supply Chain Digital spoke to Deloitte's Managing Director Brent Griffith to find out more about tech-driven procurement and collaboration with Ivalua. 

What are the most pressing challenges for procurement at the moment? 

Procurement’s at an inflexion point. We’ve seen some tremendous advances in technology over the course of the past couple of years. It’s a bit sobering to think back to Gen AI two years ago – the things that we viewed as really revolutionary in the marketplace are now fundamental to the way we do business.

We’re now seeing the emergence of technical capabilities that have the capability to really transform, drive significant improvements in efficiency and insights, as well as the effectiveness companies get from their procurement functions.

This drives the need to upgrade both technology and the entire ecosystem of operating model skills, processes and policies.

How does Deloitte’s partnership with Ivalua drive that change?

Ivalua brings great technology to the table. But, Deloitte sees technology as only one part of the bigger picture companies need. It starts with thinking about operating models, how procurement adds value, processes and policy infrastructure, and how data comes into play. 

As we get into actually implementing a technology like Ivalua, we're thinking about change management and actually using that innovation to drive sourcing analytics, category strategy and sourcing execution.

We work with Ivalua doing those things. We implement the technology, but also bring the broader business insights around the change needed in order for companies to get the most out of their procurement functions.

The work that we do rests on the fact that our clients are looking to upgrade or transform. They need the capabilities that a technology will deliver and so we engage early with Ivalua and then work closely with the client to identify the full set of capabilities they need in order to realise their vision. We deliver that together with Ivalua as the technology partner to drive maximum benefits for the client.

What makes a successful technology adoption?

Change management is one of the most critical components of these types of transformations. The benefit you get is driven as much by how widely and effectively the technology is adopted, as it is by the technology itself. 

We come in early and identify how the change and technology, combined with the broader process changes, will impact the organisation. That typically goes well beyond the procurement function to anyone who purchases anything within that business. 

We structure communication and training strategies that feed in very closely with the broader operating model and transformation. 

When it comes to technology, a big focus for Ivalua is making things easier and simpler for everyone.

In my experience, ease of use means different things to different people. That’s a huge part of change management, which means we have to work across different user groups, whether it's making a solution very intuitive or delivering a consistent technology experience – which Ivalua is very good at. 

Ultimately, it's about determining what's the right answer for the client overall and then driving the change across the organisation.

Where do you see the main opportunities from AI?

One area, which is where I really see the greatest potential to transform procurement with AI, is adding additional insights that the function has not been able to bring to stakeholders before. 

Procurement has long been one of the great treasure troves of unstructured data. Look at the insights that exist in bills of material, purchase orders, requisitions and invoices that historically companies have not been able to tap into.

AI gives the ability to mine that data, learn how to use it and turn it into real insights that can be provided back to organisations. That revolutionises how spend can be managed. 

The other area is around efficiency improvements. A lot of the foundational procurement work has been automated, but it's still then requires a procurement professional to go and actually do the work.

Gen AI is opening up the potential for virtual procurement professionals to take on some of the roles that we see human procurement professionals do today, which should drive significant efficiency.

What are the key priorities moving forward for procurement? 

At risk of repeating, I think it's that AI focus and really considering how everything that we implement is towards that future state vision: agents accessing the data that's in the system in order to actually drive more effective procurement activities.