The requirement to manually perform regular checks and balances on enterprise procurement has often been viewed as slowing the speed of business and limiting corporate agility.
At pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), this sentiment was so pervasive that the CEO once remarked that it took longer to create a purchase order than to have a child.
Similarly, at financial services leader Invesco, procurement had been operating tactically, and struggled to generate better business outcomes across the wider enterprise.
These two global powerhouses overcame those stereotypes through top-down leadership, and balancing human experience with technology driven by modern agentic artificial intelligence. Companies with large, complex procurement operations are up against another year of market uncertainty and geopolitical volatility. Modernizing procurement is one important way to derisk against these external factors.
Mandates to Modernize
Crucially, both companies launched their transformations with clear leadership mandates. At BMS, a new chief purchasing officer, Paula Glickenhaus, arrived with a mission to “rewire” procurement. One red flag that heralded the need for change was that procurement execs were abandoning what they viewed as “clunky” legacy systems in favour of email.
Around the same time, Invesco also brought in a new CPO, Al Williams, whose mandate was to rekindle organizational interest in procurement and elevate it as a function that helps drive new business value. He would focus on a new target operating model to expand “spend under management” and accelerate savings.
At both companies, leaders were pinning expectations on AI to help them do more with limited resources. As Clare Cassano, head of procurement strategy and execution at Invesco put it, “We needed a force multiplier.” AI would also force a key cultural change for teams to reframe and elevate their roles and value, from handling tactical processes to operating more strategically.
‘Delightful’ Experiences Drive Adoption
A key success factor in both companies’ transformations was prioritizing the user experience. Rhonda Spraker Griscti, executive director of digital strategy and global process lead at BMS, noted that by focusing on UX first, procurement created “pull” from the business. In the past, the organization struggled to “push” compliance through archaic tools. By implementing a native-built, agentic AI sourcing platform that allowed for a complex RFP to be created in under 30 minutes — down from months of email exchanges — the process became so “delightful” that users actively started clamouring for it.
At Invesco, Cassano adopted a similar philosophy. Her team sought to create a “single front door” for all sourcing activity, removing the friction that previously led to 12,000 manual emails a year. The guiding principle is that if the right way is the easiest way, adoption from business stakeholders will follow naturally.
Perhaps the greatest barrier to AI adoption is the misguided belief that data must be “perfect” before starting. Spraker Griscti explained that you learn what data structure you actually need only once you begin deploying the AI. She became particularly animated on this point, saying: “Don’t wait until you have perfect data. If you wait, you’ll never get started”.
BMS chose to “jump in” and use AI tools to augment and cleanse data in real time. This “build-as-you-go” mentality paid off, allowing the company to go live with AI-driven sourcing in weeks rather than years. This degree of agility also helped shift the internal culture from cautious hesitation to one of iterative learning.
Delivering the ROI in Just Weeks
Instead of viewing AI as a threat, the teams at BMS and Invesco saw opportunities to improve their peoples’ morale and job satisfaction, along with business outcomes. The goal was to remove routine, manual tasks, like weeks spent laboring over inefficient and error-prone Excel and email-based tendering processes, and free up humans for higher-level analysis.
At BMS, this approach allowed the team to insource its source-to-contract activities with half the people at half of the cost, while performing 70% faster than their previous outsourced provider. The team ran 10x the number of RFPs they had managed previously, and having targeted putting $100m of spend through Globality’s platform in the first year, they processed over $1bn in just 10 months.
At Invesco, Clare Cassano’s team delivered two and a half times the savings compared to their baseline targets and, crucially, were live with AI-powered sourcing in just weeks, compared to the months it often takes to deliver procurement transformation.
“The best decision we made early in the process was that whilst we wanted to integrate Globality with our orchestration layer, we were able to turn it on far faster and have it operating as a standalone,” Cassano said. “It literally was weeks, from a standing start, [with] no sourcing solution at all, to having Globality up and running.”
In both companies, results have transformed procurement’s reputation, turning the function into a beacon that has showcased how to generate the meaningful ROI from AI that every CEO and CFO is currently seeking. Key to these successes has been providing the vision and leadership to manage the required cultural changes effectively and take people along with them.
When asked what advice they would give to those beginning this journey, the leaders of both organizations were remarkably clear and aligned. Spraker Griscti’s advice was to “just get started,” and Cassano simply said, “just do it”. These two tales demonstrate that when it comes to transforming procurement into the “Department of Yes,” the greatest risk of all is standing still.
Peter Wetherill is vice president of EMEA for Globality.