SAP NOW AI Tour, London: Lance Younger, ORO Labs

The SAP NOW AI Tour combined customer spotlights, solution demonstrations and expert presentations, giving attendees plenty of chances to engage directly with SAP specialists and partners.

From a procurement standpoint, a series of insightful sessions explored the increasingly vital role of AI in finance and spend management.

Procurement Magazine spoke to Lance Younger, EVP, EMEA GM and Global Alliances at ORO Labs, who discussed the game-changing nature of agentic AI and the importance of the SAP NOW AI Tour.

Tell us a bit about you and your role

I’m Lance Younger, I run Europe for ORO and I also look after all of our global partnerships with tech and consulting partners. 

What does ORO Labs specialise in?

It's orchestration, automation and agents. We look at that end-to-end process, all the way from intake through to pay, and integrate multiple different solutions together into one platform. It's a core part of the procurement stack, taking advantage of where you have deep S2P solutions in place like Ariba or deep sourcing solutions in place like Fairmarkit, and adding an integration layer on top to make the most of it.

What's happened over the last nine months is the introduction of agents, which augment the process all the way from sourcing through to PR to PO.

How much of a game changer have AI agents been?

It's fantastic because we talk about the generations procurement has gone through. We went through the ERP generation, we went through the S2P generation, we went through best-of-breed and now we're in the AI era. Each one of these eras is getting shorter and shorter and, over the last year, we’ve seen agents come into play. We've got them in production in three or four different places. Many of our clients are building their own agents as well as using our agents off the shelf. As we’ve heard, agents are forming part of the workforce for procurement.

Tell us about your relationship with SAP

We've had a long relationship with SAP. Our founders are ex-SAP – they were the CTO and Chief Product Officer of Ariba Guided Buying and Ariba Supply Network. I worked at Ariba back in 2005-2007, running their implementations. So, we have a deep connection from a relationship perspective.

Now, we work with many clients, such as GSK, that have Ariba as their backbone and they're using ORO as their integration layer, as well as for agentic processes and workflows.

How crucial are events like SAP Now AI in bringing together the procurement, finance and technology community?

I love the fact that these formats over the last five to 10 years have changed radically – and changed for different audiences. I think this is the first time SAP has held this type of event for a few years, so it’s a major investment from them.

The procurement stream was particularly popular – sold out for a couple of different sessions – so we want more of that going forward.