The New Procurement Playbook | Visibility, Speed & AI for Mid-Market Growth

Hello everybody. Welcome to everybody just coming into the room for today's webinar. Whether you're on the west coast, east coast, good morning, good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. We're going to kick off now in about one minute. We're just going to let everybody come in the door and then we will jump into today's conversation. So grab yourself a beverage, get comfortable. We'll be here for the next 4:45 to an hour together. So yeah, got settled in. Okay. All right, I think we're going to kick off. Let's get right into the conversation. So again, welcome today. My name is Brona o'. Connor. I'm the VP of marketing here at Procurify. Today's session is all about rethinking how mid market organizations approach procurement, especially in an era defined by AI speed and the demand for real time visibility. So today with our panelists we'll be exploring benchmarks, industry pain points and new strategies teams are using to modernize. We are proudly partnering with Spend Matters today and excited to share their critical insights as a third party voice in today's conversation. So really excited to bring you that insight today. A couple of housekeeping notes. So we do have Q and A at the end of this session. Please do drop your questions into the Q and A section here in our Zoom webinar. We'll be sure to jump into those at the very end. Also in our chat today we have our chat mandated by or run by Amanda on our content team. So Amanda, you know, say hi to Amanda, Engage. Tell us where you're coming in from today and tell us a little bit about your role. We'd love to know who's online with us today, what kind of company you work for, what's your role and what's brought you here today. What are the pains and challenges that really made today's topic stand out to you? So please do drop into the chat and let's start getting that community spirit going throughout the conversation as our panelists are chatting. Please do drop your opinions into the chat too. They are really, really important to fuel this conversation and we love to see them and see is what we're sharing about resonating with you and really can you learn from each other. It's all about Sven culture here at Procurify and that's really where that conversation comes to life is between the audience more so than obviously us, the speakers. So I think that covers everything for us. Oh, today's session will be recorded so it will be sent to you afterwards. So if some reason you need to dip out at some point through it, don't worry, we will send you the full recording and we'll also have this session as a podcast as well. So obviously in the audio format you won't have the deck, but you will be able to get access to the deck in the notes of the podcast. So you can get this content any way that makes sense for you. And soon enough we will also have a white paper with the same information. So lots of ways to consume, lots of ways to share this information with your team. All right, so let's get into a little bit about today's guest speakers. So as I mentioned, we are partnering with Spend Matters today. We are thrilled to welcome Javier Oliveira. Javier is a lead analyst for Procure to Pay and Spend Management at Spend Matters. He has deep experience in evaluating procurement technologies and advising on digital transformation. Javier helps organizations make informed decisions through sharp market insights, detailed vendor analysis and thought leadership across the source to pay landscape. So we are thrilled to have Javier here with us today. I know many of you online will know him, know his research and be thrilled to hear his insights today. So welcome. Javier, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Brianna, thank you for having me. Thank you for this presentation and looking forward to this conversation with Jeffrey. Yeah, well, speaking of Jeffrey. So Jeffrey Hardy, welcome. Jeffrey is our chief Revenue officer here at Procurify. Jeffrey is a seasoned spend management leader. So he joined Procurify from SAP where he served a decade in strategic go to market roles. So that would include global head of strategic sales for SAP's intelligence, spend and business network. You know, having worked with customers in the spend management space for over a decade, he brings a wealth of knowledge and insight and perspective into the journeys that a lot of you are facing today and what people like you have faced and how you've overcome them. So we are dying to hear the insights from Jeffrey's wealth of experience today. And thank you for joining us on the session, Jeffrey. Yeah, thank you so much and look forward to the conversation with Javier. Amazing. Well, let's get right into the content. I'm just going to quickly show a little bit about the agenda today. So we're going to have five key parts here. It is the mid market procurement dilemma. So we're going to talk about that first. Then we're going to talk about that visibility gap. So what's it costing you? What's the problem that we're facing? Then we want to know what are leading teams doing differently. So we're going to get into that and that's really the meat of the conversation. And then how do you go about choosing a solution for today but also tomorrow your future state, how do you set yourself up for success? And then again we will have Q and A. So please do drop your questions into the chat as they come to you throughout the conversation. All right, well first off Javier, let's get into the conversation. We're excited to get this one started. Excellent, great, great agenda and yeah, well, let's start unpacking this mid market dilemma. Jeffrey Basically what we're seeing in the mid market is organizations that are really limited in resources, that they have different maturity levels, right? They don't have the same level of, in their processes, they don't have the same level even in the tech stack or the efficiency they need, right? They don't have the same productivity. Sometimes they are really more handle everything by their ERP. ERP that has been there for years, 10 years, 20 years. So that is something that we're seeing in this dilemma, right? We're seeing companies working, still working on spreadsheets, on emails, their legacy systems and again enterprise platforms that are sometimes overbuilt for their needs. So this is kind of the dilemma that we're seeing. They are having this ERP platforms that were good for 20 years ago, right? But not necessarily for today. Today what we're seeing that the mid market that are these companies that are still growing, right? But today they need to really make sense and work with what they have. And today as I said, they have limited resources, they have different maturity levels in terms of a lot of things but they need to look ahead. They need flexible motor platforms to grow with them. In our analysis of solution map we see this mid market organizations prioritizing platforms that are easy of use, that are easy to adopt, that the price is also something that they can handle, right? Because we don't need also this big pride, big, big, big solutions that have a lot of features but you don't need those features today, you may need it for tomorrow. So you need this kind of mix, you're in between this, this dilemma that we're, we're seeing, right? Trying to have ease of use, have to have a modular approach because not all the, not all organizations start from the same place. Some will probably start from let's say E procurement, some with ap, some with other areas, right? So you need a modular, flexible, modular approach for this solution that you're going to be adopting to support you in your growing path, right? So so there is a. The dilemma is a balance between functionality and usability. You don't need what we're seeing. You don't need a solution that can handle 10,000 employees if you are a 200 employees company. Right, right. You may be needing something towards that, but not today. So it's a dilemma that, that is sometimes complex to digest for all the companies, organizations, and that is why we are here. Right? Exactly. Right. Yeah. Excited for today's conversation, I think you hit on several areas that I'd like to come back to throughout the session together. I love that we're combining forces between procurify and spend matters on our view of the world today. Right. And what companies require in order to scale. So we actually launched a benchmark report at the beginning of this year. It's titled our ProcureFI 2025 Procurement Benchmark Report. We analyzed $20 billion in spend across seven different industries. And I just want to point out a couple trends that we saw. Right. Number one, a clear trend was certain industries are a bit slower to digitize. From healthcare to education and nonprofits. As an example, they experience significantly longer procurement and AP cycle times. So long cycle times are many times a symptom of very manual workflows or disconnected systems and heavy compliance requirements combined with that and slow things down. So procurement cycle times measure how long it takes from a Request to a PO&AP cycle times track invoices to submission. And both can be delayed without automation. But more digitized industries that we saw were travel and hospitality with much faster cycle times. So I'll turn it back over to you, Javier, for the next section. Yeah. And this study is basically on your customer base are mostly middle market companies, Right? Exactly. So this is interesting because it goes back to what the dilemma we were talking about and, and what we're going to talk to right now on visibility gap, but is if you can see the different industries, you can see the different. Is you need to think about why is an industry taking so long and the other one not. Right. So maybe it's because they are in different places, but that is the visibility that you need to have, right? That is the visibility that you need to understand why this is happening. Right. What is that we're missing that other industries are doing better than us. And this study that you just did is very interesting because it's the truth of what your customer base are doing, are suffering or are succeeding. Right. So very interesting study that you have there. And this goes to the visibility, Right. If we can go to the next Slide. I think we have something there. Yeah, we talk about the dilemma, we talk about middle market working with their ERP or silo systems, right, that are not integrated, that are not unified. And this needs to. That is a dilemma that they need to grow into something else if they want to keep growing and keep being competitive. And having this visibility gives you a lot of insights. If you don't have it, this is what happens, right? We're seeing what happens. You miss savings, you miss. You have poor supplier decisions, you have a different kind of situation that you don't want to have, but that is important of the visibility and visibility. Let's try to contextualize this. What is visibility? Visibility is not just numbers on the screen. It's information, data that gives you some actions to be taken to take. It's not just dashboards, it's not just something that give you insights, but that is all. They need to give you guidance and be more actionable. They need to give you some ideas of how to mitigate risk. They need to give you ideas of how your team is performing. They need you to give you visibility of all your processes, the approval, the ordering, the receiving, the invoicing to get better. Right? Everything that is linked to a budget that we're seeing, compliance status. So everything needs to be seen. If you don't see it, you cannot fix it. That's a typical saying, right? What you don't see, you cannot manage or you cannot fix it or improve it. Right? But one of the things that we have seen in the market is that insights, visibility of all the process, all the operations is not just something that is there. You need to really make this something that change the behavior of your users, improve the behavior, improve the value that your users are performing. To be more strategic, aligned in terms of what your business requires. You need to improve results. So all this visibility can play against you, but you need to think about this like playing for you, right? So it's not just data for being data, it's not inside, just for being inside. It needs to go into a goal. Like maybe it's right behavior, maybe it's improved results. Maybe it's. I don't know, it's. It's. You need to think about this. But again, if you don't see it, if you don't manage it is. These are the kind of misses that you will have, right? For sure. Yeah. There's downstream effects. So if I double click a little bit on, on that in, in relation to, you know, some of the effects, it's. You Know learnings from our benchmark report. In industries like software and manufacturing, we saw about 11 to 18% of spend is going through pre approved catalogs. So that off catalog spend, it's costing companies they're not taking advantage of discounts. It raises compliance issues, of course, and it allows unapproved suppliers to simply slip through the cracks. If we go to the next one. We also saw in biotech and manufacturing, less than 20% of spend is going to top vendors. So this points out a lack of vendor consolidation. Right. So consolidating multiple vendors within one category and making sure that you have the best negotiating power. And with more vendors, you obviously get more invoices and more manual work as well. Another area where siloed systems hurt is in the tracking of spend per purchase order, which we'll see here on the next slide. And a key indicator of how well procurement is consolidated. So in our report we saw an average spend per PO as low as $196 in health care and up to $225 in nonprofits, suggesting, you know, low value purchases that could have been consolidated. And without unified visibility across departments, across vendors becomes pretty hard to spot patterns. So going back to what you mentioned around, you need those insights in order to make decisions. So teams keep submitting these one off orders, it increases administration overhead and then they're missing those discounts that they so desire. So in this next section, Javier, we're going to hit a bit on what leading teams are doing differently. Yeah, but to your point on the study that you did, that like program did this savings, losing savings and this consolidations appeal is a really common situation on not just mid market companies, but large companies too. And if you are thinking about being a middle market going into more large enterprise, you need to start thinking about efficiencies. And these consolidations of positive are one of those efficiencies that are part of this dilemma that we were talking about. Right. So it's really good to have visibility on how you're operating in order to make this strategic decisions and not just to keep your savings or keep your productivity or efficiency, but really to think what is missing that is probably avoiding you to grow is in the best way possible, right. Into a larger company, into a more complex company too. Because growing comes with complexity. That is what we were talking about the dilemma, but also the visibility. And that gives you context to grow and to really plan on your growth. Right. And yes, that is part of what we're seeing on the leading teams doing. Right. And this is what we Were talking about the new playbook right of mid market is what leading teams are doing and they're being more effective doing stuff, doing their work, operating. And for that they need something to help them. They need maybe we've heard a lot of AI, right? But AI, well it needs to really be planned but you can use it for a lot of things like invoice, matching, fraud alerts, a lot of things that today you either do it manually or don't do it. So this is what teams are using technology in order to really make things different but make things better. Mobile first, for example, having friendlier adopt platforms that are really adopt, right. Because it's like you can have the best solution but it's not adopted well, what's the purpose? Right. So you need to do that. It's like when you are implementing a system, right. What is the critical part of implementing something is the change management part, right. So you really need to think about adoption. Adoption. And of course we talk about modular approach. This is the unification of all the process from intake, from PO to ap. All this collaboration between stakeholders needs to be happening because if not, still we're talking about silos. Right. So I think you have something else in the next slide that. Yeah, you know, I wanted to talk a little bit about. You mentioned the word, you know, unifying a platform. So when you invest in a unified platform, one of the most important metrics you can finally start tracking is spend under management. And spend under management tells us what portion of your spend follows a structured policy driven approval workflow versus you know, what's off process or in silos or disparate systems. The data here on this slide shows average yearly spend by industry. And the takeaway is pretty clear. We're not talking about small amounts. This is millions and billions of dollars flowing through procurement and specifically procure FI. So for example, manufacturing customers with US saw over $14 billion in procurement spend. But without control and visibility, a huge portion of that could be unmanaged. According to one of our partners, Netsuite, high performing companies keep 75 to 85% of spend under management. I would argue that that number should be even higher. Right. Because of the scalability of systems like Procurify that we should be getting customers to 90 plus percent spend under management. You know, most average organizations though, they sit closer to 60% or even lower. Yeah, and that is one of the spend on management is One of the KPIs that we hear a lot and had been there for centuries. Right. And it's something that In a male market, you want to really grow this spend under management in order to have this control, to have this visibility, but also is to at the end, spend under management. We talked this before. If you don't, if you don't manage, if you don't see it, if you don't manage, you cannot do anything about it. Right? These are really interesting. Yeah. I would argue this is the, one of the most important KPIs when you know, we think about, you know, driving business outcomes more so than just, you know, features for customers. The feature functionality, products, they drive business outcomes. But if you're tracking a program, you know, like a spend management program, one of the most important things out the gate is how much spend are we getting under management once the project is live. And you know, we talk about the dilemma that we were talking before and you are using your middle comp, middle market company that you are using your erp. Well, we know that the ERP have their constraints in spend on how they manage their spend, right? And that is why this new tech, new procure tech solutions like yours and others are really making this spend on management more effective, right. And they are adding more percentage into their platforms on their spend, right. So I think this is key, like you said, this is one of the key KPIs that we are seeing and I think at the same level of savings that procurement cannot get rid of it. Right. So I think we, we have another. Okay, yes. Well, again, what, what we're seeing, we just talk about this, but at the end, mid markets, what they're doing is they're choosing the correct tools, the correct solutions, not just to automate it, but they need to guide requisitions, to have good approvals to be mobile. Because at the end mobile has been, is an enabler that is very important when you have workers on the go, right. You need real time dashboards, actionables, you need ensure compliance, right? You need to drive financial outcomes at the end, right. You need to really, when you set your goals, you need these solutions or this to help you get there, right. Prevailed finance integrations. Integration is something that we talk about. ERPs that small medium enterprise or middle enterprise use ERPs for their procurement function, right? And sometimes still will be erp, the source of truth for a lot of things, right? Like suppliers, I don't know what, what many, many things. You need integrations, really good integrations to that, right? So we're not getting rid of the rps, not, not today, not soon. We need to work with them, right? But but we need to enhance the user experience, we need to enhance the functional ability, we need to extend their reach into better, better way to do procurement. And where we're talking, right, to grow into the next step that could be for middle market, either a large enterprise or something else. Right, right. I mean, as we talk about, you know, leading teams, I'd love to give an example. One of our customers, Mitra Kim. So, you know, Mitra Chem is a Silicon Valley based startup and they're pioneering AI driven iron based battery materials. So fast paced growing pains as their, as their team expanded rapidly and they needed a solution for it so they didn't have a standardized system for purchases and approvals. And procurement chaos was impacting operational scalability. So after implementing ProcureFi, they were able to establish consistent procurement workflows and integrate seamlessly with NetSuite. As we were just talking about ERP integration, you know, being very important for our customers and we, we take that seriously because they leverage ERPs as a source of truth. So the improved accountability eliminated kind of chaotic processes, enabled it to scale proactively and not reactively, which is what customers are looking for at a strategic level. So, you know, I know AI is the big buzzword and it's not a buzzword, it's a reality these days. Right. There is a giant wave of technology that customers need to either embrace or, you know, when they're embracing, I should say, they come out kind of to organizations around the tech community. They look to spin management. They come to organizations like Procurify, you know, to leverage AI for their business. Spin Matters, I know, is focused a lot on, you know, AI research right now, specifically in procurement technology. You know, as we go to the next slide, Javier, I would love, you know, your thoughts on how AI helps, you know, drive return on investment for companies. Yeah, you know, this morning we had a really great conversation about agentic AI. Right. And that is like you said the buzzword today. But AI has been here for a while, right? We have used AI for, since, I don't know, a lot of time. But AI just for being AI is not magic, Right? It requires, it requires something that is the foundation. It requires also something that is a purpose. You cannot just implement AI by implementing AI. You need a platform that has AI embedded that is all purpose built with AI. But again, it needs to create value. You need to think about AI in order to something that drives return of investment, something that really drives you into more valuable outcomes. Right. So what we're seeing, there's features that AI can support you as an organization like auto coding, fraud detection, invoice matching. There's a lot of things that AI can support you can help you. But one of the things that we were talking this morning with my colleagues is if you have a platform like procurefy that has AI embedded and we talk about the dilemma of middle market. Right. You also need the company, the organizations to be mature enough in order to adopt this AI. Right. You need context, you need data, you need information, you need a lot of things that requires first to be done right in order to implement AI, in order to take the most of these agents or this AI type of features. Because at the end the work needs to be done either with AI or not AI. But if we are doing AI, we're in the next level of efficiency, of value, of a lot of things that today middle market companies requires in order to remove this dilemma from their pocket. Right. I don't know. I think that the smarter teams are not just adding more tools, they are really picking the better ones. And that is what the very ones you will have AI embedded. Right. So I think there's this conversation can go for hours. And as you said, agents, AI is at the top of the minds of everybody. But it has to be think from a strategic approach. Absolutely. You know, on AI, one of my favorite launches of my career. You'll see it on the next slide. Here is a solution that we launched in May called Spend Insights, that's now with all of our customers. So we launched this, we're very excited about it. Procurify Spend Insights. It gives you full visibility across procurement expenses and ap, helping you better understand spend trends and make more informed decisions. So it's interactive. You can, you know, drill down, you can revisualize the data simply by asking, you know, the chat bot to, to do so. And you can drill down, you know, to call out like hey, what's an anomaly within this data? And ask the question, what's going on in June? And it will, it will prompt you on, you know, exactly what happened at that moment. So curated dashboards easily filter data by vendors, account codes, locations and more dimensions and then drill down to uncover trends or anomalies. So AI powered Spend Analyst, that's also accompanies the Spend Insight solution allows you to get instant answers to your questions and you can export data or schedule reports to make sure that your team is updated automatically and on a schedule, which I think is critical for our customers to make those strategic decisions with the view that they have here in the Solution. And you know, one of the good things about your study that you just did on your customer base and going back to my thinking about being having AI in a strategic way is that with this study you really know where this is needed, right? Where this will create value, where AI is going to create value because you have the feedback of your customers. You have a study that really gives you the insights and the visibility of where AI is going to create real value to your customer base and the organization, mid market organizations. So this is something really interesting. This is the ask my data whatever you want, right? This is something that we're hearing a lot. It's something very useful. You need to have your data right, Correct. And this is how solutions like yours, Procfi and others are really supporting too, right. And enriching data, but also having quality data quality and all these things that are required for AI to work correctly. So. So I think this is great. This is great. Could I ask you a question, Javier, which I think kind of gets us into the next topic in general is Spend Insights is very much focused on educating the market on what's out there from a technology perspective and best practices as well. So when you think about choosing a solution for the future of an organization, it's an important decision and one in which customers should have, you know, a set amount of criteria. I'm not even talking like feature function. I'm talking, you know, big value drivers. What are your thoughts in this area? Yeah, you know, first of all, we need to agree that there's a change to be done, right? We talk about the dilemma, we talk about if you want to grow, if you want to take middle market organizations into the next level, you need to think out of erp, doing your procurement function, right? You need to think about another level of functionality, another level of adoption, another level of everything, right? So you need to think about solutions. What is working for you today, right? But what is going to be supporting you in your path while you are growing right into your next level of organizations. So you need future proven for your operations, right. You need a solution that is built also for the future, but you don't need this whole set of features that are just kind of not needed, nice to have. Right? You need what is appropriate to you, but also you need to think that is flexible, that is modular, that is something that could be configured in a way to support where you are going in the next year, the next couple of years. So at the end is, I don't know if we have something in the next slide to show. But. Yeah, but at the end is you need a platform that is not complex to use. You need someone to use it. We talk about that, right? We need adoption. If it's too complex, nobody will use it, right? You don't need all the features, you need more in the middle market. You need what is a profit. But you need to think to the future. You need things like today. Another word is intake, right? Intake has been here for a while, but now we're approaching intake in a different way, right? Intake is like the front door for everything, right? So you have today the technology in order to support this kind of adoption, you have AI embedded AI in the platforms. You need to think about that, right? We're seeing solutions that are really yours, that are have AI embedded in the whole platform to support the users. To support the user in their operations, in their activities and create the value, right? You need again an intuitive ux. You need. User experience is something that before we talk about Amazon, like kind of user experience, but today we're talking about different kind of user experience, right? User experience is not the user, just it's also the business, right? User experience is what is good for the user, but what is good for the business too. And for that you need a solution that supports you on that, right? You need an end to end process, embedded unified native payments probably, right? You need to think about the extensibility of the process, the stakeholders, how they collaborate, right? You need about integrations. Today maybe you are an organization that just have one erp, but maybe tomorrow in your growing path you buy another, you buy a company, a different company that have different erp. You need to think about that, right? You need to think about how you're going to integrate with other companies, how you're going to include them into your, into your working environment. So at the end you need to think about this. But you don't need a Ferrari to cross the street, right? You need what we think or what I think is you need to think this as a solution, like someone that is assisting you, right? Right. Not another system to manage, not something that you need to manage, something that is supporting you in your operations. You need someone that assists you there, right? It's about also total cost of ownership, right? You think about that. Is how this is going to cause me to own, right? Is this going to be too expensive for us? Is this going to be. So there's a lot of elements that every organization have to do their own analysis of what they need. But at the end this is kind of an Average of the features of what we're seeing, the solutions needs to have to support you in your growing path. And that is basically you need to ask these questions in order to see what is the best solution for you. Right. I love it. I think this is a good, a great summary, you know, and our objective is our customers have enough to do in their day to day, you know, jobs. It's, it's to how do we make that easier for them? Give them, you know, more strategic insights so that they can ultimately, you know, do a lot more with a set of technology that we provide as a, as a service and can help them streamline, you know, all of their business processes that they have on a daily basis. So if, you know, if it's, if it's fine with you, I'll, I'll start to share just a little bit about Procurify. Yeah, Let me give you one last thought about this. You mentioned you companies are being asked and procurement is being asked to do more with less. Right? Right. So that is where AI comes to play too. Right. Gives you more efficiency, more productivity. There's, there's a purpose there too. Right. So, but that, that is one of the questions that you also need to be asked, right? What, what type of solution can give me this? Doing more with less. Right. So there's a lot of questions that you need to be asking yourself. We, we, we have a set of questions when we, we have a solution that is called tech Master, that we ask a lot of key questions in order for you to identify what you need. Right. Because again, you don't need a Ferrari for, to cross the street. Right. You need just purpose built kind of solution for your organization. Yeah. A key word on the top of this slide is simplification. Right. Simplified. So how do we provide a simplified but really powerful solutions for customers so they can use it today and they can use it tomorrow as well. So for those viewers that maybe haven't heard of Procurify, we're a modern AI powered platform that brings all of your spend into one place, which is critical. As Javier was mentioning earlier, with visibility, it's built for everyone and still powerful enough for core finance and procurement teams. Procurify is built to scale wherever your business is in its journey today. And we already manage $30 billion in spend for customers which was a backbone of our benchmark report. All anonymized data, just industry data. Right. To be able to produce that report. So our platform is really built on three key pillars, control, speed and insight, which I'LL hit on here. So if we kind of look at the next slide, you know, I love this slide because we call this our value wedge. And what that means is it's what you do differently than, than everyone else. Right. If we look at control for customers, it's. It's how they really shape purchasing policies. It's helping them standardize workflows, it's enforcing policies and simplifying approvals to make sure that you have financial discipline and with speed. You know, organizations need to move fast, but they need to move fast in a compliant way. Right? They need to have control. So AI powered automation speeds up purchasing and AP processes and it really frees up teams to focus on those strategic priorities that we just talked about and on insights. Real time visibility into budgets and reports helps uncover insights, optimize cash flow and really stay audit ready. All of this is really the core of what Procurify's mission is. And that mission is to provide, you know, a system that can be utilized by anyone, but it's powerful enough to be utilized by, you know, those core finance and procurement professionals. I'd like to wrap up a bit here. You know, we will save some time for questions for those that do have it. But providing a link to our benchmark report. So there's a QR code here. Just enter a name and email address and you know, we'd love to share what is a comprehensive benchmark report with our audience today. Verona, I'll hand it back to you. Amazing. Well, thank you very much and I want to compliment you both on our time management today. So. So our audience will love that. We are perfectly aligned. So that is wonderful. We like to respect our audience's time and make sure that we get you the information you need and get back to your day jobs. As we know everyone is super busy. So we do have a few questions that came in the door. We'll kick them off and I'm really going to probably Javier, as our guest of honor. I'm going to get your opinion and then we'll ask Jeffrey's opinion too. And differing opinions or aligned opinions are all great. So the first one is under spend under management. So we talked a lot about that today and the importance of it and we had a audience member ask, do you recommend a spend under management of 100% or what would you recommend? I think that is a good question. It's a great question. Ideally I will say yes, right? But I haven't seen an organization that really have 100% and it's a Complicated topic. It's a complicated, it's not easy because at the end, you know, organizations, procurement organizations, they don't manage the pool span, right. Sometimes they have it, they have marketing, they have other areas that handle their own spend. And so the ideal part is that the procurement solutions can handle those two. Right. And have the capability in order to do that. Right. But it's more like practice, type of or how organizations work. Right. Some may be easier to increment this spend on the management than others. You know, status quo is the hardest part to, is the hardest topic to really challenge. Right. Is the status quo is complicated. So in my opinion the more you have spent under management, the more visibility you have, the more things that you can do in order to create value, in order to improve, in order to make better decisions, in order to create change behaviors if it's needed. So at the end I think having more spend on management also gives you the opportunity to grow into with more idea of your cash flow management of your working capital of a lot of things that are not necessarily directly into procurement but effects. Right. Like cash management, like working capital, like other things. Right. So at the end it's a good question, but I think it's a, it's a hard target. Yeah. Maximize. What I've seen in my career, Javier, is, is you know, the highest performing organizations have a couple different ingredients in place. Right. You have to have, you know, an easy to use technology to kind of drive adoption. Number one, you have to have great best practices and policies internally which the technology can be a key enabler of. But then the third ingredient is not tech related at all. It's just great leadership. So you know, leaders have to step up and say, you know, here's how we're going to drive operational excellence in our business in, in each category of business and for procurement and AP it's we're going to drive full adoption of you know, this solution for other functions. It's leveraging people, processes and technology in their own own areas. But it, I feel like it's those three ingredients, you know, with the highest performing orgs, you know to this question before we talk about Mari expand, right. The maverick spend were that spend that wasn't really under management. Today with solutions, procuretech solutions like yours, you can still manage that maverick spend if you can embed it into the process of your solution. Because at the end it goes to an approval process, it goes to a different kind of mechanisms that make that in compliance too. So today you have more opportunities because the technology is Giving that opportunity to really have more spend, even this, that before was a really challenge. This long tail span. Right. Today you can control that even. Right. So at the end I think it's not a question of if it's 100%, 95%, it's a question of being in compliance. It's a question of being in control and have visibility of everything that you are managing in terms of spend, I think. Well said, totally nice. Another question that came in, you'd mentioned the word a few times throughout, but modularity or modular approach? So this is something of, you know, we talked a lot about ERPs and then needing a solution that actually fits you today. But I guess Jeffrey, you're talking to customers all day long and I'd love to hear, you know, your experience with modular. So it's this person asked, why is a modular approach, procurement so important? So yeah, maybe you can share your insights on that one. Great question. You know, companies face a reality sometimes where they have, you know, a few different legacy systems in place and they're trying to migrate to, you know, something new. And you know, I think it's important for spend management platforms like ours to be modular in our approach because we need to meet them where they are today, but also have the ingredients to make them successful across the spin management platform. So from purchasing to AP to expensing card. So the way that, you know, our core belief here is meet a customer where they are in their own journey and help them solve for that problem and you know, we are going to deliver value and we know we have the confidence that eventually they'll be on, you know, the full procure Apply platform. Okay, well said. I think every company, every organization is in a different place. Like you said, it's in a different maturity level in terms of process tech or whatever. So you need to meet them where they are today and create the adoption in order to keep growing in a modular way. Right. So I think the modular is important because you don't want, it's difficult if you kind of say, hey, here's the full stack, right. Adopt it. Right. It's complicated because at the end is I don't need the full tech to the full solution today. I just need this. And then when we adopt that and we really make this work, then we go to the next step. Right. And that is how you take a middle market company into the next level too. Right? Right. Yeah. The fun thing though that I've seen in my career, so, so now working with more mid market organizations is they're Actually able to kind of make these, you know, decisions a lot quicker and drive an adoption of a full platform versus if you go to know a Fortune 50 company or something like that. There is so much legacy technology sitting around. The migration path is like really, really, really long. So that's why, I mean it's, it's kind of capitalism. Right. That's why, you know, organizations that are entering a new industry and they are really the disruptor in that industry, they're able to make decisions a lot faster, you know, get better tools in place, you know, faster and ultimately that sets them up for success to, to grow much faster than, you know, some of the biggest companies in the world. Which I think is a fun dynamic specific to the, the mid market. And that's the beauty of middle market, make faster decisions. Right, right. It's, it's not the bureaucracy is not the, as the launching price or global companies. Right, right. 100 and then our final question today, which I think probably could be a session on itself. But Javier, I will go to you for this question because I'd love to hear your third party big picture perspective on all the conversations that you have in a week. And it is around AI. So the question was when it comes to AI driven automation in procurement, what are the most common areas companies are using it for today that you're seeing? It's a great question, great question. Efficiency. Everything that drives efficiency. At the end we talk about doing more with less. Every process, every activity that can be enhanced with AI that drives efficiency and can give you this doing more with less. I think that is what we're seeing, one of the main areas where AI is embedded. Right. Even with agents, if you see today you see a lot of agents there, right. But if you see the purpose of the first agents are efficiency. Right. Efficiency takes you to productivity and takes you to other benefits. Right. But at the end is if we're talking about middle market and we're talking about the constraints of middle market, I think doing more with less, everything that AI can support you in that I think is important to consider. And, and that is what we are seeing. Right. And of course user experience. Right. The user experience is one of the key topics, as Jeffrey just mentioned. Right. This kind of assistant that you can ask whatever you need and will provide you with information required of the next steps. So I think the user experience is important also because you need adoption, you need to users to use your, your solution in order to create the value that is expected to create. Right? Yeah. I don't know if that answered the question. But I think that is basically the main topic, 100%. Same things that I'm seeing Javier, from customers is, you know, step one with AI is they are looking to gain efficiency. You know, step two is it's kind of crawl, walk, run. Right. Step two is, you know, help me make some more strategic decisions and give me the insights that I need to go act. Right. And step three is, you know, at this point, speculative. We don't know what the next 10 years will bring, but we guarantee that we're going to be innovating, you know, toward where we think that the future is. And I think people that will tell you what the next 10 years will look like, they might be lying. We don't know. Yeah, I think we need one of those magic eight balls just for AI of the character. And you know, it's anyone's guess. It could be true for sure. The fun thing is in the short term, Brona and Javier is that like there are so many use cases that we know we can solve for and we are solving for and we're giving customers the tools that they need to be successful and that sets them up for success for the coming years. Right. And then each, each organization will place their big bets on what's on what the next 10 years will look like. Yeah, it's like what there's a saying, right? Think. Is that act small, think big or something different? I don't know. But it's like do what is needed today, but think big, right? Yep. I love it. That is what AI can do for you. Do the what is needed. What is efficiency? What creates value from efficiency for whatever is in it today. But think this as build this in a way that is embedded into the platform that could create more value not just today, but in the future. Right. For sure. I love that. That is neatly put a bow on our topic today around the the future of spend management. So for everybody online, you can see here, if you want to chat to us, have some burning questions, want to hear more about, you know, how we can help you especially, especially in that modular journey that you may be on. Please do book in with our team. They would love to chat you through even as an introduction, just to see where you're at, where you would get started in the near or longer term future. So please do book in with our team. They are a friendly bunch and would love to walk you through that. Of course we shared the QR code for our benchmark report so we will also share that out again afterwards. But if you'd like to have a deeper dive into that document. It is wonderful. It is a beautifully designed document. So easy to digest, get you the information across many different industries. So lots of jam packed insights in there. And as mentioned, today's session will be sent out as a recording. And we will also have the audio file on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, so you can listen to it on the go if you want to listen back or share it with somebody else on your team. And we will have that slide deck in the notes section so you won't be missing that in audio format. Well, today, that is it. We will let you go back to your day and we thank you very much for spending this, this hour with us. Javier, thank you so much for joining us today. It has been wonderful to collaborate with you on this session. And Jeffrey, always a pleasure to work with you on a session like this. And thank you for bringing those insights to our audience. So at Spend Culture, at Procurify, we're all about bringing the insights and helping everybody learn from each other and from our guests. So we appreciate your time. Yeah, it was a great conversation, Javier, thank you. Yeah, thanks, Jeffrey. Great conversation. Wonderful. See you all next time. Thanks so much. Bye. Bye.