JAGGAER REV2025: Jon Lawrence, JAGGAER

Jon Lawrence, Chief Product Officer at JAGGAER, has a track record of leading product vision and transformation. He specialises in shaping and executing product strategies which help companies thrive in competitive markets. 

Throughout his career, he has led SaaS transformations, built strong, high-performing teams from scratch and implemented roadmaps which have helped companies make stronger, more efficient decisions. 

Jon is well-versed in the positive capabilities of AI and is passionate about using it to enhance operational efficiency. 

At REV2025, Jon helped launch JAGGAER's new product, Jai, and spoke about how to balance AI automation with human oversight. 

What's the meaning behind your 'Human in the Loop' t-shirt?

In the context of AI, I think you can go anywhere in your personal or professional life today and somebody's going to want to talk about it. 

There's a lot of talk about agents and agents being able to do more and more, which is true and I think there is a path to that. But one of the things that we've analysed and understood is that it's critically important that you think about what's important. What decisions do you need to be involved in? What decisions do you not need to be involved in? But no matter what, there is some level of a human that stays in that loop.

So, we just announced Jai and we're really excited about it. I had to a chance to be the 'human in the loop' to take our vision into a roadmap. That's why I wore the uniform today. 

Talk me through Jai and its key parts

Jai is the new intelligence foundation that sits on our entire platform. Perhaps what's a little different about Jai is that it's an enabler, designed to first be an assistant or a coach – an intelligence that will flag data in a certain situation. It doesn't do anything, but it it brings it to your attention. It's a coach. You take the action.

In the second phase, we talk about a co-pilot. Think of an agent that exists to do something. If you're moving along the continuum, you'd move from not just flagging that data but flagging it and then suggesting you do something. At that point, it didn't necessarily act on it, but it's taking it a step further. It said 'here's a problem, here's what I think you should do'. But always in that last section, you're still the human in the loop at any one of those phases.

Technology is moving so fast at the moment. How important is it for Jai to offer something new?

To me, it's probably one of the most exciting things, not only the AI capabilities in general, but certainly what we're bringing forth with Jai into Jaggaer. For us, it is ultimately about being able to drive innovation and bring new ideas quickly.

Jai is going to have a release cycle that's every two weeks. It's very different from our traditional release plan for our core product which is still going to stay in place. Jai is designed to be released frequently, because the pace of change is hard to keep up with.

The other thing about AI is you almost have to adapt your mind to understand what it could even do. It's how you start breaking through that really gets interesting. 

The second piece is how we're building the roadmap. The thing about AI is it does actually require data to actually learn. So, having a high-powered use case and finding somebody that wants to work with you, willing to explore that value, is how you build a roadmap. You're ultimately packaging and finding high-value use cases and you're able to tease out of those things every other week and generate that value. 

What does the future of this technology look like? How do you go about constantly developing it?

This is our 30th year in business, so we've been working with procurement data for years. There's an understanding of the data, but a big part of any effort to launch something like Jai and to prepare it for the future is talent.

We're actively recruiting and gaining talent and will continue to do so. So I think it's the combination of this flywheel that gets turning and that flywheel of knowledge, that flywheel of data. I think what we'll start to see is the broader B2B market starting to interact more. Instead of interfaces and APIs, you start having agent to agent.

I think there's going to be a combination of an intentional focus on growth, collaboration and new ideas, as well as opportunities that are going to just grow out of partnerships and these agents talking to each other. A process that maybe was less efficient, less automated or problematic now can be driven between systems. As we look into the future, I think three years from now it's going to look very different.

It's hard to think about what it was like six months ago, a year ago. I believe there's a good chance this all gets accelerated, which is not something that a product leader often says. It's a combination of being able to almost pull the future in, based on how you interact and how you stay focused on value and outcomes. Don't focus on the technology, focus on the value. And I think that's what's going to exponentially grow in the future.