It’s approaching a year since I joined BuyingStation.
Looking back at what we’ve developed during that time, there’s one theme that seems to run through much of it: ecosystem.
That theme hasn’t only shaped the development of our platform. It has increasingly shaped how we think about our project work, our managed services and the partner network we’re building around BuyingStation.
Within the platform, we’ve continued to develop the functionality and deepen the insight available across individual areas such as Projects, Suppliers and Contracts.
Each is an important vertical stream in its own right. We’ve strengthened the functionality, improved visibility and made the information within those areas increasingly useful and actionable.
But the real power isn’t only in what each part can tell us individually.
It’s in what they can tell us together.
That’s where our new AI Consultant becomes particularly exciting.
It gives us a way of looking horizontally across those vertical streams, connecting information and helping someone understand what is happening across their procurement environment rather than having to look at each part separately.
We’ve been applying much the same thinking to our services.
Our project work and managed services increasingly draw on specialist capabilities in areas such as ESG, risk, contract review, spend analysis and sourcing. Each gives us the opportunity to go deeper into a particular area, but again the interesting part for me is how we connect that expertise and intelligence to create a fuller picture for our clients.
Then there is the ecosystem developing around us.
Our clients. Their suppliers. Our delivery partners. Our technology partners. Specialist capabilities that extend beyond what BuyingStation itself needs to build.
I increasingly see these not as separate propositions or relationships, but as connected parts of a wider procurement intelligence ecosystem.
Going deeper while looking wider
Procurement has become increasingly specialised.
That’s a good thing. We need people who understand categories deeply. We need expertise in contracts, risk, ESG, supplier relationships, systems, governance and data.
Technology has tended to follow a similar path. We have developed systems for sourcing, contracts, suppliers, spend, risk and pretty much every other part of the procurement lifecycle.
Each can become very good at what it does.
The problem is that procurement doesn’t really work like that.
A supplier doesn’t live neatly in a supplier management box. They might support several contracts, be involved in different projects, represent a financial or operational dependency and have ESG commitments that matter to the organisation.
The same is true of a contract. It isn’t just a document sitting in a contract management system. It represents a relationship, expenditure, obligations, risk, performance and a series of decisions that may need to be made over its lifetime.
So we need the depth of the verticals, but we also need to be able to look across them.
This is where I think AI gets much more interesting.
A T-shaped AI Consultant
I’ve started thinking about the BuyingStation AI Consultant as T-shaped.
It can look vertically into an individual area and help someone understand what is happening there, but it can also look horizontally across the platform.
For me, that’s where the real potential sits.
A procurement practitioner shouldn’t have to think about which module they need to go into before asking a question.
They might simply want to know which suppliers need their attention, where risks are starting to emerge, which contracts they should be thinking about or what their current project pipeline is telling them.
A CFO might come at exactly the same data from a completely different perspective.
The question is specific to the person, their role and their organisation. The information needed to answer it may sit across several different places.
The AI Consultant can bring those things together.
It is still using the information within those vertical streams, and the quality of those individual areas remains important, but it can start to make sense of the relationships between them.
That changes what the platform can do.
A procurement nervous system
I often use natural ecosystems as an analogy for procurement because there are similarities in the way they work.
Think about a rainforest.
At first glance we see the obvious individual parts: trees, plants, animals, water.
Look more closely and there is an extraordinary network of relationships between them.
One of the most interesting examples is the mycorrhizal network created between fungi and plants beneath the ground. What we see as individual organisms above the surface is connected by something much more complex underneath it.
Signals travel through the ecosystem.
That’s quite close to how I think about what we’re trying to achieve with the AI Consultant.
We have the visible parts of the platform: Projects, Suppliers, Contracts and the information and insight sitting within each of them.
The AI Consultant starts to create connections across them.
In that sense, it becomes something like a nervous system running through the procurement ecosystem, picking up signals from different places and bringing them together for the person using it.
That doesn’t mean handing procurement decisions over to AI.
I don’t think that’s where the value is.
The value is in helping people see something they might otherwise have missed, ask a better question or understand the wider context before they make a decision.
The judgement still sits with the human.
The same thinking in our services
We’ve increasingly applied the same approach to our project work and managed services.
Over the past year we’ve developed specialist tools and approaches around areas including spend analysis, ESG, risk and contract review.
They allow us to go deeper.
But if we treated every one of those things as an isolated service, I think we’d be missing the point.
A contract review might highlight a supplier risk. Spend analysis might identify an opportunity that develops into a sourcing project. Something identified through ESG analysis might change the way we think about a category or a supplier relationship.
These things are related because the client’s organisation is related.
The more we understand those connections, the better the conversation we can have with them.
That is particularly important in managed services. Over time you build up knowledge of the organisation, its suppliers, its contracts, its stakeholders and the way it operates.
That context has value.
The opportunity is to make sure we use it rather than continually looking at each new piece of work in isolation.
Expanding the ecosystem
The other part of this thinking has been our developing partner network.
An ecosystem doesn’t require one organisation to do everything.
In fact, that would rather defeat the point.
There will be specialist organisations that know far more than we do about particular areas. There will be technology providers that have already solved problems we don’t need to solve again. There will be partners who can bring expertise, scale or relationships that complement our own.
So we’ve increasingly been looking at how BuyingStation can connect into that wider environment.
That includes delivery partners, but also technology partners and specialist capabilities across areas such as procure-to-pay, risk and sustainability.
For our clients, that potentially creates something much more useful than a collection of disconnected solutions.
It creates an ecosystem that can develop around their needs.
Where this takes us
When I look back at the last year, I can see how much has changed.
We’ve developed the functionality within the platform and improved the insight available in the individual vertical streams.
We’ve developed new specialist capabilities across our project work and managed services.
We’ve started building a broader network of delivery and technology partners.
And now, through the AI Consultant, we’re starting to connect more of those pieces together.
For me, that’s the exciting bit.
Procurement sits in the middle of an extraordinary number of relationships. Finance, operations, suppliers, contracts, risk, sustainability, technology and people all intersect with it.
We need specialists who can go deep into those areas.
But somebody, or something, also needs to be able to look across them.
That’s increasingly how I see BuyingStation.
Yes, as a procurement intelligence platform.
But increasingly as part of a much broader procurement intelligence ecosystem.
And perhaps the biggest opportunity isn’t another piece of functionality at all.
It’s making better connections between the things we already have.
