Standalone “Intake to Nowhere”, “Classic Onboarding and Supplier Management”, “Predictive” Analytics, “Contract” AI, “Agentic” AI or Classic Mega-Suites … until 2029

Yes you need intake and orchestration.

Yes you need supplier management.

Yes you need predictive analytics.

Yes you need AI-based contract analytics.

And, yes, you definitely need “Agentic” AI that executes (but does not make) decisions.

And if you’re a (mid) mid-market or larger, you need a suite.

But you should not buy any of these products, at least not now.

Why?

The majority of intake and orchestration platforms, and especially the ones that have raised nine figure VC (i.e. 100M or more), are overpriced and under featured. Modern intake and orchestration that modernizes interfaces, simplifies workflows, optimizes clicks, and makes process adherence easier than doing it any other way is valuable, but not that valuable. It’s essentially better middleware 3.0 for the web, and very easy to replicate. There might only be a few players now, relatively speaking, but you’re about to see a slew of these players who literally do nothing but put very nice lipstick on a big fat prize-winning pig (who’s not happy about it), which is a lot easier to do than raising the prize-winning pig from a piglet to a prize winner. At the end of the day, you need actual functionality, and that’s where the real value lies. (And today, that means shilling out for a classic mega-suite to layer the fancy new intake platform on top of, which costs you more, not less.)

As competition heats up, and technology advances, this will be the easiest, cheapest, play and you’ll soon find out that what the big players claim is worth 1M is only worth 100K to 250K, and you still need to go spend that 1M+ on traditional platforms that have deep functionality. So either buy a platform with real functionality with orchestration built in, or wait another year or two. It’s gonna get cheaper and better for standalone I2O. The market has not yet been zipped up.

Supplier Management is very important, but the vast majority of the one hundred plus (yes, that’s 100+) solutions on the market — be they best-of-breed, suite-modules, or hybrid data/contract/content management solutions with a supplier focus — are no longer up to the task. As per our recent post on supplier management must be continuous and proactive throughout the supply chain, these classic point-in-time solutions are no longer up to the challenge of modern supplier management as they can’t even detect changes in supplier behaviour in real-time that are indicative of emerging risks, yet alone supply chain events that are going to seriously impact supplier behaviour in short order.

As a result, they aren’t worth very much. Moreover, if you look at what classic onboarding applications do, they collect data that they force the supplier to enter during the onboarding process — data that, for the most part, is publicly available on the supplier’s web site, third party registries, and other (internal) enterprise systems — data that could easily be consolidated and pre-filled by modern RPA / Agentic applications that would not only allow a supplier to “onboard” in a fraction of the time by pre-gathering all of the fields. In other words, modern (A)RPA and Agentic data gathering applications do the work of classic onboarding, and with their prolific propagation, do it cheaper and put serious downward cost pressure on these classic applications. Moreover, these next generation solutions, which are dropping in price as well as they are becoming a dime a dozen, can continuously monitor these data sources, detect data changes, and (queue) update(s) in real time. Plus, they can accept feeds from supply chain systems and correlate events that might be meaningful.

So, if you’re still in the situation that can survive off of a last generation solution, wait a year or so, and get it for pennies on today’s dollar. But if you can’t wait, make sure you get a modern solution that can monitor supplier and related supply chain changes — it won’t cost more, and if you don’t lock into a long-term subscription, you’ll be able to keep costs way down on renewal (or easily switch to another platform with the same functionality for a lower cost in a year or two).

To be continued …