Standalone “Intake to Nowhere”, “Classic Onboarding and Supplier Management”, “Predictive” Analytics, “Contract” AI, “Agentic” AI or Classic Mega-Suites … until 2029
Yesterday we reminded you that while you need intake and orchestration, you need supplier intelligence, you need predictive analytics, you need AI-based contract analytics, and you need “Agentic” AI that executes (but does not make) decisions, you should not buy it standalone, at least not now, and you definitely shouldn’t buy a classic mega suite.
While all of the solutions we have tackled so far are currently over-priced, Agentic AI, which is the new hype, is the most over priced offering of them all, especially with the consistent over-promising by these new generation vendors that are promising BS “AI Employees” while delivering task automation that is reliable as a chocolate teapot where consistent, dependable, execution is concerned. Now, some of these vendors will figure out that you need constrained, double guard-railed, multi-agent systems with human monitoring and exception intervention and eventually deliver reliable augmented intelligence systems that make an average employee super human, and they will be worth it, most of these vendors will simply try to out-prompt each other through custom clod and chat, j’ai pété wrappers, cr@p out at about 80% to 95% reliability depending on the task, never be trust worthy, and never be worth it. Since these just started to hit the big time, with ridiculous over-funding, in the past year or two, it will be three more years before the dust truly settles and 2029 before you want to make any long term bets.
Plus, if you know the real history of AI, which is probably older than your grandfather FYI (with the first algorithm to be awarded the title developed 70 years ago), you know that it’s usually close to two decades before a new algorithm is mature enough, and understood enough, with real, solid, mathematical measures of reliability, for mass, unmonitored, industrial use. And typically at least a decade before it’s ready for leaders to apply it in industry for monitored, target, use. The first LLM hit the scene in 2018. That means 2029 is also the year it will finally start to be reliable for a certain (but small) set of tasks in certain (but a small set of) domains. It will still hallucinate more than an LSD loving dead-head, but by then we’ll have much better detection methodologies and confidence measurements and will actually be able to trust it when the results get through the multi-layered security gates that we’ll finally be able to build with more understanding.
And yes, as we’ve said twice already, you need this tech. But buying “best of breed” will only “bleed your cash in the best way possible” with little measurable return.
But don’t return to a “classic mega-suite”. These are now more over-priced than ever. First of all, as we’ve discussed many times on this site, unless you are a Fortune 1000/Global 3000 multi-national with extensive, and complex, source-to-pay needs, you don’t need to pay Millions of Dollars a year for a suite when an 80% mid-market solution for 250K a year will do the trick. (See our piece on how much should you outlay for ADVANCED Source to Pay.)
Not only do most organizations only have a few categories where advanced technologies are needed, and usually only in one or two of the modules the mega-suite sells, but most of their categories are so straightforward that even BoB mid-market solutions present not just an 80%+, but a 90%+, solution. Plus, modern ARPA and appropriately focussed Agentic solutions are allowing mid-sized organizations to cobble together “good enough” solutions from low-cost 80% point solutions for 10% of the cost of a mega suite that gets them started on their journey, allowing them to upgrade to better solutions as they need, and only as they need.
This is putting severe cost pressure on the mega-suites, which are going to have to admit that most of their solutions, workflow, and UIs are over a decade old and not worth the premium they once charged. For organizations that truly need these solutions, from vendors which aren’t aggressively updating their solutions (due to these vendors being purchased by PE firms at too high a valuation and, thus, being forced to cost cut to meet ridiculous sales targets), if they wait a year or two, these will soon be priced at what they’re worth, and you’ll get an annual license for less than half of what they are charging today and get all the functionality you need to boot!
So, at the end of the day, while you need a solid Procurement solution that comes with a modern intake front-end, has orchestration at the core, provides you supplier intelligence, integrates the analytics you need, helps you with your contracts and their processes (to the extent you actually need that help), and allows for adaptive robotic process automation for all your well defined tasks (and provides the data foundation for “Agentic” AI if you have valid applications where such technology will actually bring value), you don’t need to overpay for it. And you definitely don’t need to pay the double to quadruple price tags that current mega-suites are charging.
But if you can find what you need, at a fair price tag, and you buy that, you buy real value that will appreciate with time because it will do what you need it to do, at a fair price, and that’s the only way you save time and money with ProcureTech. Getting what you need, when you need it, at a fair price point. You know, classic Procurement!
Remember that.