Amazon Business Webinar: Autonomous Sourcing and Procurement

The strategic industry shift towards hands-free sourcing marks a definitive departure from traditional, manual procurement, leveraging cutting-edge AI and technology to build a streamlined, self-governing ecosystem.

By establishing a comprehensive understanding of the precise mechanics governing self-correcting sourcing cycles, organisations can successfully unlock significant capacity within their operations.

Procurement Magazine, in association with Amazon Business, examines how intelligent agents are currently managing complex negotiations, RFPs and supplier selection with minimal human oversight.

You can watch the webinar on demand now. Click here to watch on demand.

On the webinar, two commercial procurement and supply chain leaders discuss how AI-driven negotiation tools can secure optimal terms without manual intervention.

Benn Godfrey is a chief procurement officer and supply chain advisor with a track record of driving innovation and value in complex, high-stakes environments.

"You can't hope to just repeat an outcome you've seen elsewhere, even within your own organisation, without really getting under the skin of what it is that made it work and what variables you need to understand," Ben says on the webinar. 

"The unintended consequence of over-reliance or over-optimisation can be you build in fragility to a supply chain, because you've over-optimised for one particular outcome."

"Lots of evidence suggests that a hybrid person and machine model outperforms pure automation, especially where it's ambiguity heavy or where the objectives are poorly defined."

Enterprise architecture

Also on the webinar is Abhi Ghosh, Digital Procurement Lead at Deloitte.

"The new role will be: how do we gatekeep those agents to do what we want them to do, not overstep, not understep, looking at AI agents as a control tower," Abhi said.

"This technology is bringing a lot of the functions together to think in a bit more of an enterprise architecture way of working, rather than thinking just as to what may benefit procurement."

Watch the webinar on demand here.

Amazon Business

Amazon Business is a worldwide procurement platform aimed at helping organisations of any size simplify their purchasing processes, monitor expenses, and enhance supply chain efficiency.

The platform features several AI tools for procurement teams, including Amazon Quick—an AI assistant that streamlines professional workflows and assists users in completing tasks across various procurement roles and more. It can identify emails needing attention, craft sales presentations quickly, and more.

Unlike basic Q&A tools, Quick integrates with popular apps, automates tasks, learns user preferences, and acts on their behalf. For instance, Prime Business members assessing a pricing strategy can use Quick to research competitors, gather relevant cost data, and identify potential risks they might have overlooked.