David Khuat-Duy: Leading the AI Orchestration Era

While 2025 was defined by AI experimentation, 2026 has emerged as the year of true disruption.

David Khuat-Duy, Founder and Chief AI Officer at Ivalua, spoke at Ivalua NOW 2026, where he explored the strategic transition from traditional procurement software to AI-driven orchestration.

David looks at the shift from simple process optimisation to agentic AI, detailing how autonomous systems are breaking human bandwidth constraints and providing a scalable blueprint for the future of the autonomous enterprise.

What inspired your transition from being CEO for 25 years to becoming the Chief AI Officer?

I am an engineer by trade, and I reached a point where I felt AI was becoming incredibly powerful. I realised it was going to disrupt the software industry and the way we work, not just how we build software, but all operations.

It’s also going to disrupt our customers. We needed to provide something within our platform to help them thrive through this period of change. I felt this was a deeply strategic challenge, and I loved the challenege of taking it on personally. That is why I decided to make the change.

What has this past year shown you in your role as Chief AI Officer?

It’s certainly not slowing down; if anything, it’s accelerating. I feel like 2025 was the year to experiment and deploy. We’ve already deployed AI for many customers, but that was the "first version" of AI, focused primarily on optimising existing processes.

Now, we are entering a new era where AI can operate for people. It can do the work. This is a massive shift driven by the latest model releases and a more mature agentic approach, which is more mature. 2026 is the year where this disruption becomes real-life for enterprise processes and organisations.

Are you seeing successful use cases and tangible results from your customers and partners?

Yes, absolutely. More than 50% of our customers have deployed AI in live production and are using it daily. They are seeing real ROI in terms of cash, efficiency and scale.

Previously, customers were constrained by their own bandwidth, they could only do as much as their human resources allowed. With AI, they can go beyond those limits. For example:

• Procurement scale: They can launch more RFPs (Request for Proposals) with more suppliers, leading to greater savings.

• Contract analysis: They can analyse more contracts to manage risk better.

• Efficiency: They can achieve a quantity of work that was simply impossible before.

What is the one thing you want everyone to take away from today?

Don't miss the train. I invite everyone to 'jump onto the Ivalua train,' especially with our upcoming release of IVA Studio in the next few months. It will be a very powerful new version of our platform, and I encourage everyone to test it and try it as soon as possible.