Americas Procurement Congress: Procurement's agentic moment has arrived

At Americas Procurement Congress in New Orleans on Monday, 23 March, Procurement Leaders convened some of the sharpest minds in the industry to share ideas at the AI Forum 2026. 

The headline panel, "Turning AI from a board-level directive into real business impact," brought together Globality customers June Dozier, Director of Technology Sourcing at Meta and Eileen Wollam, Director of Strategic Sourcing at ServiceNow along with Nitin Barge, VP of Customer Transformation at Globality. Moderated by Niko Nurmi of Procurement Leaders, this was a frank, experience-grounded account of deploying agentic AI in sourcing at scale.

From experimentation to execution

There's a distinct change in the understanding of the value of AI across the procurement community. Teams have moved on from debating whether AI belongs in procurement to comparing tools, workflows, and results. As Eileen Wollam explained, it's no longer "have you tried it?" but "which one are you using and what for?" 

The results Meta and ServiceNow see are real. Wollam described a business case development process that once consumed ten hours or several days of back-and-forth, now completed in thirty minutes. June Dozier spoke about market research that previously took weeks, sometimes months, being turned around fast enough to brief a VP the following morning. 

The long tail problem

One of the clearest arguments for agentic sourcing came from Dozier's framing of 'the long tail problem'. There simply aren't enough sourcing managers to cover high-volume, lower-complexity spend, and hiring your way out of that problem isn't a viable strategy. The goal, as she described it, is a process that is more autonomous, low touch, and more streamlined, freeing practitioners to focus where human judgment genuinely adds value.

The numbers bear this out. Wollam noted that where a sourcing manager might once have produced 50 RFPs in a strong year, the new expectation, supported by AI, could be 100, 150, or even 200. 

Build versus buy

The panel confronted one of the thorniest questions facing procurement technology leaders: whether to build internal AI capabilities or buy specialized platforms. ServiceNow's position was candid, even an organization that "drinks its own champagne" and prizes being at the technology frontier must acknowledge when external players have already built something that can get you to your goal faster. It's a pragmatic stance, and one I expect more CPOs to land on as the pace of development accelerates.

Reframing the value conversation

Nitin Barge challenged procurement leaders to think hard about how they position AI internally. The CFO's office tends to frame the question in terms of FTE coverage. Business stakeholders ask about time saved. But procurement, Barge argued, has a genuine opportunity to shift that narrative away from cost reduction and toward incremental value creation.

Leading CPOs are already making this move. Rather than starting from "how much spend can I cover more efficiently," it's more important to ask: what value can I unlock that I couldn't reach before? That's board-level discussion, made possible with AI.

What comes next

The forum reinforced something I see consistently in conversations with procurement leaders: the organizations pulling ahead have recognized that the technology is mature, that it already delivers real value, and they are using it. They're building the muscle now, experimenting, measuring, iterating, and using early wins to secure investment for the next stage.

What's emerging is a Best of Breed Agentic strategy, where forward-thinking CPOs layer specialized AI sourcing solutions on top of their existing S2P infrastructure to provide capabilities those platforms weren't designed to deliver. The goal isn't rip-and-replace. It's augment and accelerate.

The drivers are consistent: savings through genuine value creation across both strategic and long tail spend; speed by compressing sourcing cycles from weeks to hours, as Wollam and Dozier demonstrated; and usability by making procurement intuitive enough that business stakeholders engage, rather than route around it altogether.