Ivalua NOW 2025: Q&A with Ivalua's Pascal Bensoussan

Ivalua NOW 2025, held in the suitably grand surroundings of New Orleans' Caesars Superdome at the end of May, brought some of the biggest and most innovative names in procurement and supply chain together. 

Held over two days, the event was a hotbed for showcasing the latest technologies, strategies and methodologies for advancing global procurement functions. 

Unsurprisingly, given Ivalua's position as a world leader in cloud-based and AI-powered spend management, the transformative potential of innovations like gen AI and AI agents were at the top of the agenda. This included many of Ivalua's own new launches. 

After a opening keynote by Ivalua CEO Franck Lheureux, which set out the company's vision for tomorrow's procurement, Chief Product Officer Pascal Bensoussan took to the stage. 

He discussed the company's AI-driven plans and presented V10, it's next major platform version, in more detail. Highlights included how V10 leverages agentic AI to revolutionise procurement processes, and how the company is using a multi-agent approach.

Supply Chain Digital spoke with Pascal after he left the stage. 

How rapid has AI adoption been in procurement in recent years, and what’s driving the pace of change? 

It's been hugely energising to talk about where we're heading with the Ivalua platform and highlight how we're bringing AI and agentic AI to fruition in a very concrete way.

There's a real intrigue and interest around AI. Development and innovation of AI agents and Gen AI has sped up over the last two years. We’ve been building those core capabilities into our platform, particularly with IVA, our Gen AI-powered intelligent virtual assistant.

I see an inevitable progression towards agentic systems, where agents will increasingly play the role of humans to provide greater depth in analysis, execute tasks more efficiently or bring greater levels of automation. 

At Ivalua, we view AI almost as an existential opportunity. If you transform and properly adopt you'll stay relevant in the next three to five years. If you don't, you'll no longer be competitive.

Your keynote focused on the V10 platform update and autonomous, agent-based functionalities. Tell us more about the multi-agent approach that you're taking.

V10 is our new platform focused on four key themes: accuracy, compliance and security, experience and agility. 

It brings a new approach to the way data is defined, the way it's exposed to agents and how they understand it. It also transforms the way agents understand all of the different functions and methods available to them.

AI agents will be able to make decisions based on the context and objective given to them, with the knowledge of different data sources they can tap into and the actions they can take.

For customers, it effectively means thinking of an AI agent as almost orchestrating humans and workflows with the authority and autonomy to do so.

Ultimately, V10 brings a level of transparency, safety, exposure and structure of data to the platform that enables agents to make decisions and execute workflows.

Is this about helping procurement to be more strategic and value focused? 

Absolutely, that's key. And it's where we're heading with V10. We're demoing various use cases.

One is the ability to drag and drop a contract from a supplier. Iva will then automatically generate that contract in our application, upload the document and file, extract as much information as it can and fill it out in a form that is traditionally handled by a human. 

Another is the ability to talk directly to IVA, asking for information about key performance indicators, analytics, reports and more by simply using natural language.

It’s a huge advantage to be able to engage an AI agent like that and have the information you need come straight to you.

Collaboration and partnerships are central to Ivalua. How does it influence the development process?

Everything starts with a use case, often from customers and partners. My first inclination is to always ask ‘why do you need an agent, gen AI or AI to do that?’. In half the cases you actually don't, but people tend to think of AI agents as a magic solution that will do just about everything for you.

Every time I have a use case, I begin by defining how much should be enabled by an agent or AI process versus implementing simple rules, checking data or updating a document into our system automatically without even asking an AI to make a decision. 

Collaborating with partners is crucial for giving us these kinds of insights. All of it feeds into how we develop our products.

You talk about AI being a journey, what are Ivalua's key priorities with V10 and with AI more broadly?

Our priority is to make it almost a non-event for customers to migrate to V10. Ultimately, we know it will bring a better, faster and cross-device user interface. It'll also have a far better data model that centralises all aspects of communication with agents, as well as communication with external API systems to improve orchestration. 

Our objective is to finish and migrate customers to V10 throughout 2026. 

At the end of the day, it's all about giving clear and practical value and enabling AI agents in a very practical way.

We are learning so much by deploying agents in our own internal systems that we're able to provide great insights to customers on best practices for deploy into their own procurement systems.

We recognise the very deep, transformative power of gen AI and how we can bring that to our customers in a concrete way. It's an imperative and a mission for Ivalua.

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