Ivalua NOW 2025: Q&A with CEO Franck Lheureux

At Ivalua NOW 2025, held at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, the spotlight focused on transformation—and on Franck Lheureux, the company’s new Chief Executive Officer.

Taking the reins from Founder and former CEO David Khuat-Duy, who now leads Ivalua’s AI strategy, Franck brings almost 20 years of enterprise software experience into a new era for procurement.

Known for his work at JDA Software, SAS France and Soft Solution, Franck has led global supply chain strategies for Fortune 500 companies.

In his first keynote, he laid out a direct challenge; procurement must go beyond technology adoption and redefine how it operates and delivers value. Against a backdrop of global instability, he called for both long-term thinking and short-term agility.

Here, we speak with Franck to explore what this means in practice.

Could you just tell us a little bit about your journey at Ivalua and how you became CEO?

I joined Ivalua in early 2018 after working for a couple of American software technologies previously.

I joined as a Managing Director in charge of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and after three years of fast growth a lot of new customers joined us and, over the time, we opened up no less than six fully on subsidiaries; including in the UK, Italy, Sweden, Germany and so on.

We decided to pivot the organisations to a more vertical focus. I became the Chief Revenue Officer and then David came to me a year ago and said: "Frank, would you be ready for your next gig? I want to turn my entire focus and energy towards AI."

He wanted to embrace it and focus a hundred percent of his time on bringing his power and energy to it, which led me take on the CEO job.

Would you say the sense of community you mentioned in your keynote is what made Ivalua stand out to you when you initially joined?

Yes. I think the community means a lot for us. It's not an empty word.

Everyone's talking about building communities and their customers as part of their community, but we try to make it genuine and sincere. I value the feeling and vibes of connection, and the longevity of customer tenure at Ivalua is unprecedented.

Ivalua is my fifth software company in 26 years of being a humble servant to technology. Never have I seen such a retention rate for customer engagements. North of 97% customer are written year after year. So hopefully demonstrates the value we deliver to customers, and also highlights the sentiment of belonging to something more than just a technology supplier partnership.

What were your highlights of Ivalua NOW: AMER 2025 here in the New Orleans Superdome? 

Connecting with people, learning from amazing customer stories, hearing about where we should improve as strategic suppliers of all those customers.

We have the opportunity to be a better company and better serve them. That's what I'm about.

Why do you believe it's so important for people to gather in this way, specifically in the US, right now?

Its about the sense of community and people interacting with people, people learning from each other, people being curious, and people caring about others.

You can do that through Zoom and through social networks. All that exists. But building human experiences and human relationship is so much more different when you make it in a unique environment.

Our job is also to create experiences. That's why we picked this location. It's a pretty unique experience to be here where the Super Bowl, perhaps the largest sport events gathering on the planet, happened three months ago.

We're here now and we love this experience for our customers and partners - thanks to them too. I think this is part of our community sentiment. We try to build and create the experience of coming together.

What does the Innovate to Elevate slogan mean to you?

I think as a human being we have a mandate, especially here and now, to elevate consciousness, elevate our standards of curiosity, welcome the newness and unknown, and embrace this amazing opportunity that AI and Gen AI breakthroughs bring to us.

Innovation is a vehicle, a level and a pass to elevate our human game and lift our capacity to impact not only our organisations positively, but eventually to do better for the world.

What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities in the industry at the minute?

I think that one of the biggest challenges is around talent.

On one hand there is not enough talent to fulfil the need of procurement's reinvention. Those guys are competing with every other company department, which is the first challenge. Secondly, on the talent side for procurement leaders, CPOs have to rethink how to embrace digital transformation and the Gen AI or AI disruptions that're coming through.

We were talking to a set of large customers in the US prior to the show and they all wondered if they need to recruit engineers, prompt engineers and Gen AI experts, not just experts in negotiation, category management and markets intelligence, because their future might be focused on how to adopt this piece of transformational technology, which is more general-led than it is business-led.

How have you personally seen procurement shift from the more transactional function to being at the forefront of most companies now? 

I think procurement raised its game and its profound impact on the company's resilience, capacity to operate and capacity to gain profit share a few years back. It's not something new.

Procurement in many organisations has been elevated to a boardroom function but, in the last few months, I think procurement has faced a new set of challenges and a new set of opportunities like inflation, tariffs, lack of business, and building a long-term strategic perspective.

It all impacts the way supply chains have been organised, logistics networks have been built and supplier resilience has been challenged. So I think it's a unique opportunity, a lifetime opportunity again for procurement leaders to reinvent what they do. And it goes way beyond the short term savings.

Yeah, savings matters and cash flows impact all that matters, but it is no longer at the core of what procurement does. Pivoting business models, co-creating new products, co-creating new packaging, co-investing with suppliers on new markets penetration. That's what those guys do for a living now on.

I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about the time-saving element of implementing AI. You mentioned in your keynote that you're actually using this to build more human connection? 

Yeah, it is because at the end of the day, one of the shortest term or immediate paybacks that companies expect from Gen AI or AI use case deployment is saving time, saving the burden on looking at documentation summarisation, compiling data or raising insights. All that matters.

But the question no one asked was what are we doing with rendering time to people? Are we going to cut jobs or could we find a smarter way to invest to the company's benefits or to the employee's benefits? This render time and what I mentioned during my keynote happened with a couple of customers, like we're going to use the time saved to rebuild human relationship with our suppliers and eventually with our colleagues. What if we were spending way more time connecting our supply chain business partners? What if we were spending more time with CFOs and account payables to get them into the supplier dynamics?

In many companies, those relationships don't exist anymore because there's not enough time. We're struggling to end a day and to clean our mailbox. Gen AI is there to get us a better life, get us a better purpose in job. That's my desired outcome. And many companies sees it that way actually.

Where do you see the most transformational business benefits of implementing AI?

Again, I think the number one opportunity is to be a better customer to your most strategic suppliers.

We live in a world where the most business-critical suppliers are critical for reason. They do something different to serve you as a customer. That's why you picked them. That's why you love the business. That's why you try to lock them in the contract for the next few years. But guess what, this supplier may also be the best supplier of your main competitors.

So why should they pick your business in times of resource scarcity if we cannot solve and serve the entire demand? Some suppliers are picking and choosing, saying 'I'm going to pick this strategy customer to serve first.' What do you do as a customer, as a procurement officer to create way more strategic relationships and longer term, win-win strategies?

Those exist not in all categories and not with all suppliers, but they are the one that might deliver value to your customers. That might help you to leapfrog and defeat your competition by what they bring to you uniquely. So protect the relationship and build it to the next level of community.

Intersecting your business purpose is what I see working the most. Gen AI rolls into that by creating bridges, creating a frictionless relationship, helping your suppliers to read your sell-out data, perform better, forecast better, to better plan their inventory levels or better serve SLAs.

Its about deploying and strengthening collaboration amongst business partners.

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