Category Archives: Analyst

In the Age of AI, the Analyst is King!

Never forget this!

(Click here to learn why DPGLabs.ai is best tool a VENDOR has to judge their perceived place in the ProcureTech market if that’s what you’re looking for.)

This rant is inspired by Dr. Elouise Epstein who, in this LinkedIn post, said the most wrong and dangerous thing she ever said. (And this SI article is an archive of my immediate rebuttal, found in this LinkedIn post.)

Saying that in “in the Age of AI, analysts are superfluous” is akin to saying that, “in the Age of the Internet, the Journalist is unnecessary” … and we all know how false that was, and still is. (Because the claim that the internet allowed everyone to be a journalist was not only far from the truth, but also ignored the fact that many people misuse the internet to spread rumours, conspiracy theories, and false facts that, when combined with FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), caused others to spread and amplify those same false facts. And if Gen-AI has proven one thing, it’s that it can spread and amplify falsehoods at the speed of light.)

(Now, this is assuming Dr. Epstein believes that an analyst does more than sticking random logos on a worthless map. But if that’s her definition of analyst, then maybe she’s right.)

There are multiple problems with her statement, and more problems than can fit in the 3K post character limit of LinkedIn, so we focussed on the biggies, as that should be more than enough to point out how Gen-AI has made the Analyst more critical, not less.

1) We are not in an age of true AI. We are in an age of hallucinatory Gen-AI.

This means that, even if all the data available is mostly correct, the AI can still get it wrong.

2) DPG Labs is NOT using evidence, they are using content from various URLs and weighting it (and, if the weighting is high enough, calling it evidence).

This means that if a vendor floods third party sites with unmarked advertorials filled with fake or misleading content, the vendor profile that Gen-AI creates is sure to be wrong.

3) Most vendors and customers blast success stories and hide failures.
(No one wants to admit they blew millions of dollars.)

These only come out in private conversations and the only “evidence” comes a few years when the customer switches to a different platform much sooner than the norm.

etc.

This means that no auto-generated profile can be considered reliable without human review. (And the odds of correctness range from 95%+ for the major vendors where there is lots of correct content to work on to 50%- for new vendors with little content or a lot of misleading/inaccurate content.)

But even if the profile is mostly right, tech cannot do the following:

4) Judge organizational fit.

That goes beyond a score. (That’s why Xavier Olivera and I designed the SpendMatters, now Hackett, Solution Map as a TechMap. We assessed what most organizations couldn’t, gave them average unbiased customer scores against that assessment, and let the organizations focus on what they could assess — their needs, the vendor’s culture, service, relationship approach, etc. — and not what a static map can’t do.)

5) Give you a true timeline and success rate.

Vendors over promise and under deliver, as they all assume perfect scenarios that never materialize. Dumb Gen-AI can just assess statements, not fact, and can’t understand what factors are involved in the 3 month best-case implementation, the typical 6 month implementation, and worst-case 12 month implementation for organizations of similar size, complexity, and geography in the vendor portfolio (where even the best case 3 month is still twice as long as what they promise).

6) Help you decide if you can trust the vendor.

This is probably the most important point. Do they have what they claim, can they deliver it, and are they committed to delivering it to you on time, schedule, and budget. And it’s not just their word, or a third party survey on a select customer sub-set, it’s based on realistic assessments of performance and the individuals assigned to your project.

etc.

That being said, DPGLabs.ai is the best tool a VENDOR has to judge their perceived place in the market.

It’s also the best foundation out there on which to build a true next-generation analyst offering. If this existed a decade ago, the efficiency gains it would have enabled would have allowed us to cover 80%+ of the vendors in depth at Spend Matters (vs 20%-) on Solution Map as it would have slashed our research and writing time* and allowed us to focus on verification, gaps, and uniqueness.

I described why the offering is the best tool VENDORS have, as well as how it could be the best tool to build a new analyst offering in the comments (of the original post) in detail in this LinkedIn post, where I have included the content below for easy access.

But even though the offering has a lot of value, it’s still nowhere close to a replacement for a true analyst.

The true value of DPG Labs.

After 20 years as an analyst, I’ve learned a lot.

This includes the fact that a lot of vendors don’t know how to position themselves, and know even less about how they are positioned in the market.

To this day, I still see new vendors regularly misusing purchasing, procurement, and sourcing when describing their offerings and wondering why they aren’t showing up in the right lists, maps, or articles.

I see vendors over-focused on the hype-du-jour (AI, Agentic, Intake to / Orchestration, Analytics, etc.) who completely ignore descriptions of rock solid capabilities or unique offerings that would differentiate them from the 40 to 100 other offerings that sound almost the same. (See the SI Mega Map if you don’t believe how many competitors you really have! The 7EB V1 edition has 888 vendor logos.)

I see vendors who have no idea how the market, and more importantly, how the search engines / AI tools used by the market see and position them.

What David Bush and his team have built at DPG labs is the perfect answer to that. By correlating and cross-referencing to a common vocabulary all of the external data and coverage on you against a standard functional map definition (that captures the questions buyers are likely to ask), you can see which categories / verticals / etc. the market is putting you in and which vendors you are being put up against. If those aren’t the vendors you expect to / want to be put up against, this means one or more of the following is true:

  • you’re not describing your offering appropriately
  • the coverage you’re getting is not focussing on the key / unique / valuable aspects of your offering (and you have to change your analyst relations / marketing / partnership approach)
  • you’re (trying to) compete in the wrong market

and you have rock solid proof you can take to the C-Suite that you need to market / sell / partner different if you want to succeed.

Up until now, analysts could only tell you this … and you/the C-Suite could ignore us (by claiming it was our opinion — which it was, but our expertise meant we were right the vast majority of the time). But this tool is essentially doing what pros using AI (enhanced) tools are doing to research you, and showing you where you stand.

It’s the one offering that I would have loved to create when I was at Spend Matters, but never could (because, even 3 years ago, the AI models just weren’t there to support it). And it’s the one tool you need the most. (Plus, market clarity will ensure you score better on the right maps since the analysts will have a better understanding of you before the first interaction, which will help them ask the right questions, focus the demos, and give you the right coverage.)

And even though you can use it to create a shortlist as a potential customer, you can’t use it for final selection. I explained why in this comment, where I also reiterated how great it would be as the foundation for a next-gen analyst firm. The core rationale is the following.

We have to remember:

  1. publication is NOT evidence, it could be opinion
  2. probabilistic assessment of language is not human assessment of language
  3. news coverage is often still marketing, especially when it’s an advertorial or there is paid coverage
  4. disgruntled customers can spread lies as well as truth
  5. even “verified” sources can be hacked or altered or replaced on the internet
  6. … and when (correct) coverage is insufficient, errors (and hallucinations) multiply in Gen-AI (frontier models)

Your (Gen-) AI tools don’t know any of this! Unless every profile you build is reviewed by an expert human AFTER an expert human review of the solution (i.e. a real analyst with real knowledge and experience), which DPGLabs is not doing (as they don’t have a real analyst team), you can’t be sure it’s accurate and not free of hallucinations.

P.S. This means the only profiles I’d trust on DPGLabs are the human reviewed profiles that Dr. Elouise Epstein reviewed, which would be the profiles of the vendors she knows well, and that’s a small minority!

* Not that Gen-AI produces good content, but, as per above, when enough material exists, it can create great summaries that allow an analyst to get a reasonable expectation of a vendor offering before the demo, produce summaries for the vendor to self-correct, and produce the auto-gen fact sheets, allow the analyst to focus their efforts and writings on the true analysis, opinions, and insights that you really need.

We Don’t Need State of Procurement Reports. We need Procurement Problem Prescriptions!

And we need Hackett Spend Matters to give them to us!

There’s a reason we picked on Hackett this week in our follow up to our 35 part series on why you really DO NOT need to read another State of Procurement report for Five Years, and that’s because we need Hackett to give us solutions to procurement problems.

We need them to tell us not just how to

  • prioritize our concerns
  • extract the core issues
  • identify the most relevant barriers
  • rank the most likely risks

but tell us

  • why some concerns take priority, based on organizational impact
  • how to identify the core issues, so you can learn to do so yourself
  • where you will encounter the barriers, and the techniques for busting through them
  • what the key risks are, with the mitigations and responses you need to put in place

The reality is that

  • you know what your concerns are, but you don’t know which are the most critical to your success when you are overworked, underfunded, and the world is literally burning around you
  • you likely weren’t trained in root cause analysis, and if you’re not a process expert, you will likely have difficulty getting to the root cause (especially if it’s deep in another part of the organization or the partner ecosystem)
  • you don’t know which barriers are equivalent to reinforced concrete and truly blocking your success and which are essentially made of paper mâché and easily conquered
  • how to deal with the most significant risks, especially when you can’t predict them all or influence their likelihood at all

This is the help you need … and Hackett, with the acquisition of Spend Matters, is the only analyst firm with the bench strength left in Procurement to do it!

The reality is that the original analysts in our space (first at AMR Research, which was acquired by Gartner; and then Aberdeen, acquired by Harte Hanks; and finally Forrester) all departed years ago. The number of analysts who have been in, and continually analyzing, Procurement Tech for 20 years is now countable on your fingers (and since Mickey North Rizza, at IDC, and Magnus Bergfors, at Gartner, both did a long stint in the vendor ecosystem and Jason Busch recently departed the analyst space for the vendor ecosystem, I can only confirm [besides myself] Jon Hansen of Procurement Insights, Andrew Bartolini and Christopher Dwyer of Ardent Partners, and Chris Sawchuk and the legendary Pierre Mitchell at Hackett [who goes all the way back to AMR]) as vets who have been consistently analyzing the Procurement space for at least the last two decades (back to when SI started 20 years ago in 2006). If you look at the handful of organizations with a senior Procurement analyst with two decades of experience, only Hackett, who also has Xavier Olivera and Bertrand Maltaverne, have a real Procurement Analyst team with deep bench strength where you have four senior analysts who each have 25+ years of deep Procurement expertise!

No other organization can give us the deep insights and playbooks we need to elevate our Procurement organizations, and do it without defaulting to the BS of “just implement the tech-du-jour of our sponsors and use our [associated] consulting arm to do it” — which we all know is not a solution (because, if it was, your problems would have been solved two decades ago)! But if they don’t do it soon, before Pierre and Chris retire, they won’t be able to — and, frankly, neither will anyone else! The time is now for them to stop wasting their analysts’ time on “state of” surveys and reports and instead explain what the findings of the last decade mean, what processes are needed to address the gaps, what organizational changes may be needed to implement those processes, and why we need to return to the classic

  1. PEOPLE-FIRST
  2. PROCESS-SECOND
  3. TECHNOLOGY-LAST

approach to solving problems and that, in the modern age, we have to actually modify this to:

  1. PEOPLE-FIRST
  2. PROCESS-SECOND
  3. DATA-THIRD
  4. TECHNOLOGY-LAST

because

  1. we are the ones who have to execute the business, all machines do is transmit and process data
  2. problems are solved by repeatable, predictable, dependable processes that can be executed by humans in a worst case scenario (even if intended to be automated to the majority of the time)
  3. no process can be executed without the right information
  4. technology only comes into play when we know it’s the right solution (and we can’t know it’s the right solution until we’ve addressed the people, process, and data elements)

and to do this, you need a lot of experience, domain expertise, knowledge about what data is available, and deep technology knowledge.

And this is another area where Hackett brings deep bench strength.

From the beginning, most of the analysts in our space were not technologists but operations research people, business finance, economists, accountants, and even historians. Few had computer science or engineering degrees and fewer still relevant experience building/installing relevant applications. At Hackett, Chris and Bertrand are engineers and Xavier and Pierre are computer scientists, who all have relevant real world experience with tech. They have a much better understanding of what tech can, and can’t do, then an average analyst (and are much less likely to have the wool pulled over their eyes by a new “AI-first” player that does nothing more than wrap a third party LLM to deliver a solution of questionable performance and reliability, for e.g.) and can do a much better job of not only recommending what type of tech to use, but who you should look at and why, versus just “who comes out in the upper right of of the magic map” based on blended subjective scores that, at the end of the day, mean nothing.

But the clock is ticking and time is running out. Let’s hope Hackett realizes sooner than later what types of research and reports we really need vs. just wasting their key analysts’ on surveys and summaries thereof.

HACKETT CONFIRMS THE STATE OF PROCUREMENT HAS NOT CHANGED … No Need to Read The Full Report!

Nothing makes my point better than slide 15 on Trends in Procurement priorities in the 2026 Procurement Agenda and Key Issues Study Results sponsored (at least) by Jaggaer, SAP and Unit4 (and likely others).

Basically, every year you have the concerns of

  • supply continuity
  • cost reduction against inflationary price increase
  • strategic business advisory
  • digital transformation and the tech-du-jour (analytics to AI)
  • operating model improvements

All of the risks fall into our eight ever present risk categories:

  • Talent: Access, Acquisition & Retention, Retiring Workforce Impact
  • Disasters: (Other) Supply Chain Disruptions
  • Cyberattack: CyberSecurity Risks
  • Spend Pressure: Economic Downturn, Changing Customer Expectations, Capital Access, Competitive Alternatives
  • Supply Shortage (and Trigger Events): Trade Wars, Geopolitical Tension
  • Regulatory Compliance: Regulatory Compliance, Ethics & Privacy, Product Liability
  • Corruption: IP Loss
  • Tech-Du-Jour: AI-enabled Tech, Tech Transformation Delays, Tech Obsolescence

It’s the same-old, same-old situation when it comes to initiatives, except the tech-du-jour (AI) is nearing the top of the list, and the ecosystem is essentially the same, only the names of the players have changed. And, of course, the conclusion is, surprise surprise, to employ the tech-du-jour which, lo-and-behold, Hackett stands by and stands ready to help you with (despite the 94%+ failure rates found by MIT and McKinsey).

In other words, it’s the report we expected, and the first of many to come. (As you can expect every other analyst firm and consultancy will soon be releasing theirs, if they haven’t already. But we won’t be reading them, and for the next five years at least, neither should you.)

And, with the exception of the key shifts in concerns, issues, risks, and barriers, which could be a two page summary, it’s not a report you need to read through as very little has changed in the last decade.

THE STATE OF PROCUREMENT HAS NOT CHANGED! So Ignore all the Reports Flooding Your Feeds!

Between November of last year and January of this year, SI published a 35 part series on why you really DO NOT need to read another State of Procurement report for Five Years in order to save you the trouble of reading yet another report that was 95% the same as last year’s report, and 85%+ the same as the report you read five, if not ten, years ago.

The realty is that:

  • the barriers to success never change (just their relative criticality based upon which ones are currently your biggest obstacles)
  • the risks never change (although some go up each year while others temporarily go down)
  • the concerns never change, with the exception of the tech-du-jour which just replaces the previous tech-du-jour when the hype cycle changes

And this is because

  • the core function of Procurement HAS NOT changed since the first manual was published one hundred and thirty nine years ago, which means
  • the issues Procurement is addressing today are essentially the same fundamental issues Procurement has always been facing which means
  • the priorities have not changed either

And you don’t need to read 30 to 60 page reports to realize this. All that’s relevant is what climbed or fell on each list since last year since that tells you

  • which challenges are coming your way if they haven’t hit yet,
  • which technologies and trends are gaining hype status, and
  • how your peers see their priorities for the year

Nothing beyond that is useful, as the functions, issues, priorities, concerns, risks, and barriers are the same (although some have rapidly climbed the charts with a certain World Leader randomly removing regimes, starting special military actions, and blocking trade routes with no warning).

Vendors Have Lured Big Analyst Firms Astray Because Buyers Don’t Understand They Get What They Pay For!

About the same time we asked Why Aren’t ProcureTech Analysts Doing Their Jobs Anymore, THE REVELATOR asked, in a comment stream, how did … the analyst consulting and ProcureTech solution providers lose their way by championing technology-led, equation-based modelling?”.

Which is a fair question as this ties into why we believe many ProcureTech analysts aren’t doing their job anymore. As per our previous post, we believe the firm is the problem (even if the firm doesn’t know it, but in most cases, the firm should), and, more specifically, the primary reason is bad direction.

But let’s get back to THE REVELATOR‘s question. The answer is this:

At one point, the successors to the founders and/or the sales team took the easy way out and switched to vendor sponsorship.

As us grey beards, who have been around since the beginning of ProcureTech, will recall, there was a time buyers paid for research because they understood the value of unbiased research. But, like Project Assurance, that’s a hard sell when a buyer might spend 10K, 50K, or 100K with no guarantee they’ll identify a single viable solution among those covered in a report. Seasoned, well educated, and thoroughly experienced executives will understand the value of risking 10K to 100K on a report or study before committing to a 100K or 1M+ annual investment, because losing 10K is much better than losing 100K or 1M, and can be chalked up as a cost to doing business. But those executives who are uneducated in management and risk and inexperienced, which are many of today’s executives who were put in place because of their affiliation with investors, or a perceived ability to run a business off of balance sheets alone (even though these MBAs are the reason so many high tech companies are struggling and companies like Boeing are facing disaster after disaster — they don’t realize that you can’t run a business you don’t understand and that’s why, in the first Industrial Revolution [and the Gilded Age the US is so desperately trying to bring back], Engineers ran the show, and not over-glorified accountants and lawyers), don’t understand that or the risk of using vendor funded reports to make a decision.

For these successor and sub-par sales people who just weren’t up to the task of the hard sell, when marketing organizations come along and, out of the blue, threw big money at them to sponsor a study, no sales effort required, they jumped on it. More vendors see the success of the first vendors to adopt this approach, follow suit, the money starts flowing in, and the model shifts. Unbiased researchers have to shift their studies to those aspects where the sponsors do well or leave the firm. Moreover, the search for new hires focus on those with less experience or ethics (who can be easily swayed in the direction the big sponsors want). (So before accepting the results of any study, you should be echoing Mr. Klein and asking Who Paid For That Study?)

This means that, over time, instead of an industry leading analyst firm we get a marketing organization that echoes the “technology-led” approach or puts the product, vs. the solution, first.

Moreover, it’s going to stay this way until some big firms step up and say “enough is enough” and stop vendor sponsorships all together and some big clients step up to fund the research. As Mr. Köse keeps saying, you get what you pay for.