WEBINAR – You Can’t Automate Chaos: Scaling Procurement with AI-Native Orchestration, presented by OMNEA

Procurement teams are often trapped in ‘intake chaos’ – chasing fragmented requests across Slack and email while struggling to maintain compliance and visibility. As organizations scale, this manual ‘busywork’ prevents procurement from moving beyond a reactive administrative function to becoming a true strategic partner.

In this fireside chat, James Rafferty, Head of Procurement at Thumbtack, joins us to share how he transformed their procurement process into a seamless, guided experience. By moving away from legacy ‘AI-bolted-on’ tools toward an AI-native approach, Thumbtack has streamlined how requests enter the business, ensuring every spend and risk check is handled with precision from the start.

The conversation will explore how Omnea’s conversational intake and agentic AI act as a ‘strategic front door,’ steering employees toward preferred suppliers while automating the complex orchestration of legal, risk, and finance approvals. We’ll discuss the shift from managing manual workflows to delivering measurable outcomes – including drastically reduced cycle times and enterprise-wide value realization.

Attendees will gain practical insights on:

The ‘Front Door’ Strategy: Why intelligent intake is the foundation of procurement value – capturing the full picture in the fewest steps to eliminate time-consuming follow-ups.
AI-Native vs. AI-Bolted On: Understanding the difference between basic automation and agentic AI that handles the heavy lifting of supplier assessments and stakeholder summaries.
Driving 100% Adoption: How Thumbtack created a process so intuitive that employees actually love using it, ensuring shadow IT is tackled and compliance is built-in by design.
Measurable Outcomes at Scale: What a successful transformation looks like in practice, from accelerating contract reviews to achieving a single source of truth for every supplier.
The Future of AI SRM: Lessons learned from Thumbtack’s journey in moving from fragmented systems to a unified, AI-powered supplier relationship management platform.

Speakers:
James Rafferty, Thumbtack
Ben Freeman, Omnea