Ivalua Tour: Alex Saric, CMO at Ivalua

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence is fundamentally redefining what technology can handle across the supply chain.

With the launch of IVA Studio, procurement teams are transitioning away from clunky, fragmented tools toward seamless, single-agent automation. Talking to Alex Saric, CMO at Ivalua, he explored how real-time risk tracking and automated workflows are saving valuable time, why critical thinking remains an irreplaceable human skill and how shifting transactional tasks over to AI allows procurement professionals to finally focus on what they do best: building strategy and nurturing vital supplier relationships.

In very simple terms, what can IVA do now that your procurement team couldn't do six months ago?

The big change with IVA, now powered by IVA Studio, comes down to a few things. One, it's moved to a single agent model, so this one agent can actually do everything in the entire source-to-pay process that a user can within the platform.

Probably most excitingly, it can do it right away. You don't have to integrate anything; there's no extra work to configure use cases. This really moves to a much simpler experience to engage with, but it also means that procurement can drive much more complex processes that can free up much more time for them to focus on what people do best, which is relationships and strategy.

Do you have any practical examples of how IVA and IVA Studio are already benefiting procurement teams across the world?

We already have beta customers using it and we'll be rolling it out shortly in general availability for all of our customers. There are a lot of different examples, and the fact that it can do so much means that the scope is huge.

But I think where a lot of the excitement is, is pulling in information from different places and then tying that to workflows. A great example is our MCP integration with Dun & Bradstreet, the only vendor to do so. IVA can actually track if a supplier for one of our customers suddenly has a high insolvency risk, and there's been a big deterioration in their financials or other risk elements.

It can automatically action based on that and flag it to users, even recommend potential alternatives within their install base or within the market, and ultimately leave it up to the user to decide, using a simple switch, and if so, follow through on that action as well.

How do you think the role of a procurement team will change over the next couple of years, and what are the most vital skills that will come to the forefront with the emergence of AI?

The real shift is going to be primarily focusing on strategy, making those key decisions, and nurturing relationships, both within the rest of the business, to understand the strategy and make sure that their supply chain and procurement strategies are aligned with it, but also with suppliers themselves.

A key element of resilience is not just picking the right supplier but having that relationship in place. And I think that by default is going to change the skill set. It's going to require much more of a human relationship-building component, and also critical thinking, because this is a real key point with AI: you need to be able to carefully assess the recommendations and then make that ultimate call.