Ep 01: The Agentic Procurement Diaries: Why This Is a Once-in-a-Few-Centuries Revolution
Release Date: 09/16/2026
888: Remove Friction, Build Trust: Prioritizing the Partnerships Behind the Data
Art of Procurement
Procurement teams are under steady pressure to do more with less, and AI has made boards impatient for faster, smarter answers. Most teams can't build every capability they need in-house, so the CPOs pulling ahead are redesigning their operating models around the right external partners. Getting that right depends on removing friction from the process and building trust with stakeholders and suppliers alike. In this episode, I'm joined by Hiten Parmar, Chief Procurement Officer at Beazley, and Prerna Dhawan, Chief Product Officer at Beroe, for a candid look at how their partnership actually...
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Ep 03: The Agentic Procurement Diaries: Boring Enough and Safe Enough: When AI Gets the Keys
Art of Procurement
Dear Diary… "I was watching a lot of smart people, day in and day out, looking across documents, opening folders." Most procurement teams pick AI use cases by asking what the technology can do. Liza Tsimbal started somewhere else. On a random Tuesday, an OEM technical issue had a room full of smart people hunting through old drawings, contracts, and email chains for one piece of information. Her conclusion: information you cannot retrieve fast enough might as well not exist. Liza is the Director of Supply Chain Management at TransAlta, one of Canada's biggest power generators. She leads a...
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887: Sustainable Procurement: Where Policy Meets Practice W/ Nicole Darnall
Art of Procurement
“If you're not thinking about what you inherit through your procurement decisions, then you're not truly serious about managing your climate impacts.” - Nicole Darnall, Professor, Arlene R. & Robert P. Kogod Eminent Scholar Chair in Sustainability, American University - Kogod School of Business Companies have spent years setting sustainability goals, developing policies, and asking suppliers for more information, but there can still be a significant gap between those commitments and the decisions procurement teams make every day. In this episode, Philip Ideson is joined by Nicole...
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EP 018: Provider of the Week: Candex
Art of Procurement
“Everybody’s trying to simplify. Everybody’s trying to make the process better and the end-user experience for buying better.” - Jeremy Lappin, Co-founder and CEO, Candex Are you frustrated by the endless friction and noise around tail spend? Candex Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Lappin shares how procurement leaders are breaking through the complexity of global tail spend and solving supplier onboarding, compliance, and cross-border payments without adding “yet another tool” to the stack. In this Provider of the Week conversation, Jeremy reflects on Candex’s evolution from startup...
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886: The AI Performance Gap: What Procurement Leaders Are Doing Differently W/ Christopher Sawchuk
Art of Procurement
“It has to start with the business outcomes that we want. This becomes an operating model decision. Technology has to support the operating model that we're designing.” - Christopher Sawchuk, Principal and Global Procurement Advisory Practice Leader at The Hackett Group AI adoption is quickly becoming commonplace in procurement, but the biggest performance gap is in how some organizations are using it to rethink the entire way procurement work gets done. For procurement leaders, the next stage of AI maturity may have less to do with finding another use case and more to do with...
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Ep 02: The Agentic Procurement Diaries: The Work-Work Balance: Building an Agentic Supply Chain at SLB W/ Jeffrey Ostrander
Art of Procurement
Dear Diary… "I use AI a lot to help scout out things or pose challenges and see where solutions are being marketed along those lines." Jeffrey Ostrander runs a nearly $5 billion business in one of the most dynamic supply markets on the planet. His team has left the starting block on agentic AI. What they are still deciding is how far into the race they want to run. That distinction runs through this whole conversation. Jeffrey talks about pilots that stumble, business cases that change daily, and a supply base of machine parts makers who are not sitting in front of a computer. Jeffrey is...
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885: Procurement Should Be a Safe Pair of Hands in a Complex World W/ Frank Mckay
Art of Procurement
“Do we have a supply chain that we are building that is going to allow us to navigate and be agile enough, no matter what the world continues to throw at us?” - Frank Mckay, Chief Supply Chain & Procurement Officer, Jabil Procurement and supply chain have traditionally operated as distinct functions, but growing complexity, new technology, and rising expectations around resilience are making that separation increasingly difficult to maintain. In this episode, Philip Ideson welcomes back Frank Mckay, Chief Supply Chain & Procurement Officer at Jabil, to discuss how closer alignment...
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EP 017: Stop Buying Technology. Start Changing the Operating Model W/ Mason Morgan
Art of Procurement
“AI makes the answers cheaper, so the good questions and good judgment really become the coin of the realm.” - Mason Morgan, Managing Director, Managing Director at CrossCountry Consulting focusing on AI and innovation in S2P Procurement technology has come a long way, but simply adding new technology to existing processes doesn’t guarantee better results. As AI becomes a bigger part of the procurement operating model, leaders have to think differently about where technology can create value, which processes are worth preserving and not handing over to AI, and how their teams need to...
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884: Beyond On-Time Delivery: Measuring Supplier Stability W/ Shayan Farshid
Art of Procurement
“You don't need an advanced platform to begin. You just need consistent definitions, discipline, to look at the data, and a willingness to move beyond the on-time delivery average to make really good decisions going forward.” Traditional supplier scorecards can tell procurement whether a supplier delivered on time, but they may not reveal whether that supplier’s commitments are becoming less reliable over time. In this episode, Philip Ideson is joined by Shayan Farshid, a procurement and operations professional, to discuss the Supplier Stability Index, an open-source framework Shayan...
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Ep 01: The Agentic Procurement Diaries: Why This Is a Once-in-a-Few-Centuries Revolution
Art of Procurement
Dear Diary… "I believe we are in the midst of a revolution — and I think in a revolution, we as a vendor also want to invest a lot in educating the community on what's really changing and how it's changing." This episode kicks off a new Art of Procurement podcast series, produced in partnership with Zycus. I sit down with the person who made the series possible to talk about why it exists and where agentic AI is really heading. Aatish Dedhia is the Founder and CEO of Zycus, a company that entered procurement in the early 2000s and has lived through every wave of its digitization since. He...
info_outlineDear Diary…
"I believe we are in the midst of a revolution — and I think in a revolution, we as a vendor also
want to invest a lot in educating the community on what's really changing and how it's
changing."
This episode kicks off a new Art of Procurement podcast series, produced in partnership with
Zycus. I sit down with the person who made the series possible to talk about why it exists and
where agentic AI is really heading.
Aatish Dedhia is the Founder and CEO of Zycus, a company that entered procurement in the
early 2000s and has lived through every wave of its digitization since.
He traces procurement's last 20 years from digitization to machine learning to generative AI,
then makes a bold claim: this is a once-in-a-few-centuries change, closer to the Industrial
Revolution than to mobile or cloud.
In this episode of The Agentic Procurement Diaries podcast, Philip Ideson and Aatish discuss:
- Why a point agent is not agentic, and why agent sprawl is causing companies to miss the real
ROI of AI
- The three layers of guardrails that keep agents in check: the system of record, the agentic policy
layer, and the human in the loop
- What procurement leaders overestimate and underestimate, starting with the truth that you
cannot put AI on a broken process
- The three segments Zycus sees today: AI hungry, AI curious, and AI resistant
Links:
Aatish takes this conversation further at PLAN 2026 on November 18
AOP Provider Directory | Zycus