In Conversation with  James Meads, Managing Partner, James Meads Consulting.

James Meads is a seasoned procurement professional who now helps mid-market companies with their procurement digitization strategies and works as an advisor to procurement technology startups on their product development and marketing strategies. He is also the host of the popular weekly show “The Procuretech Podcast”, featuring all that is exciting and innovative in the digital procurement space. 

James Meads

• The digital procurement space has evolved along with greater digital transformation in organizations. RPA and Artificial intelligence will transform the procurement space to a great extent within the next 10 years. Many of today’s repetitive functions will become relegated to automated processes, freeing up productive time for procurement. However, this requires that people in these functions become more technology savvy. At the same time, sales needs to be more about making human to human connections, even if organizations leverage AI for initial prospecting. 
• Sales in general has good data, but procurement does not have access to very good data. This is because Sales has fewer SKUs, and fewer people who touch that data. Procurement data is on the other hand, inherently of poor quality in most organizations. Procurement officers in elucidating their challenges towards digitization and greater strategic roles, usually cite poor data and resources. Resources are typically tied to the fact that they are spending time on repetitive tasks that could be automated. 
• Better data quality will enable procurement to be better prepared in terms of strategic functioning. Most transactional procurement functions will be eliminated, as these can be performed through AI and RPA. Only in strategic roles and supervision, machines will not be able to replace humans because AI cannot think for itself- it still has to be programmed to produce the results. There will thus have to be data analysts to qualify the data and extract the right insights to refine the algorithms that can produce actionable results. 

These and more insights you never find in the public discourse around Sales and Buying in this candid episode of The Buyer Side Chat. 

Run time – 44.26 mins.