[Dallas, TX – May 7th, 2025] Keelvar Konnect 2025 was held on May 6th, 2025 at the House of Blues in Dallas, Texas, and brought together over 150 procurement professionals from more than 60 global enterprises for a day of innovation, collaboration, and strategic insights.

Key Themes and Highlights

The Rise of AI in Procurement

The event kicked off with a keynote by Keelvar’s Founder & CEO, Alan Holland, who explored the transformative role of AI agents in enterprise procurement. The key takeaway from Alan’s presentation, and from the entire day, is that the time to automate is now. 

Alan illustrated with a few examples the outstanding results that leaders in procurement automation have achieved over the past couple of years. One particular customer went from running less than 20 sourcing events per year to almost 3,000. These events run x1700 faster, and 98% of them are automated. What’s more, this automation resulted in FTEs managing roughly x1000 more spend each, and is saving almost 8,000 hours of work per year. 

For guidance on how to start automating, read more here or get in touch with us! 

Scaling Sourcing Excellence

‍Panelists from Ryder, Intel, Interstate Batteries explored how scaling sourcing excellence isn’t just about having the right tools, it’s about building the right capabilities and culture and then using technology to create and share templates that make them repeatable. 

Having a Center of Excellence (CoE) which is empowered to act as a ‘traffic cop’ – guiding teams to the right tools, processes and resources – helps balance structure with flexibility and ensures that excellence is set by leadership. 

Navigating Market Volatility 

Industry leaders from companies like Solvay, Boston Consulting Group, and Zebra Technologies along with Keelvar CCO Dylan Alperin discussed how procurement can no longer afford to be reactive. Leaders are shifting strategies to stay ahead of disruption by:

• Adopting technology-enabled sourcing strategies such as Dynamic Market Sourcing
• Gaining deeper visibility into supply chains (all the way down to tier-2 suppliers) to understand cost drivers.
• Using scenario and sensitivity analysis to build agility and flexibility into sourcing.
• Moving beyond static cost models to dynamic, real-time ones that adapt to inflation, shocks, and geopolitical shifts.
• Redefining success metrics to include sustainability, supply continuity, and predictability, not just savings.

To navigate market volatility, procurement leaders must rethink resilience: it’s not just about redundancy, but about quantifying hidden costs like service, quality, and speed – and conditioning suppliers to act fast.

‍Business Value Consulting – Demonstrating ROI

Keelvar recently introduced a new function spearheaded by Toby Burton: Business Value Consulting. Keelvar’s approach to Customer Success is partnership-oriented, working with the point of contact on the customer side to solve problems as they arise and demonstrate the value of working together. 

Toby Burton shared his framework for proving value, which can help all procurement leaders surface the ROI they’re getting from their existing tech stack which is instrumental to unlock more budget from procurement’s financial stakeholders. 

Product Innovation

The last session of the morning was hosted by Tara Dixon, Keelvar’s VP of Product, who unveiled the latest updates to Keelvar's product roadmap. No doubt there were a couple of breakthroughs. Two upcoming releases particularly stood out with the audience: firstly, AI Sourcing Agents – capable of proactively launching, executing, and improving sourcing events. Secondly, Machine to Machine negotiations: Keelvar is officially launching ‘bid automation’ which allows suppliers to automatically place bids, meaning sourcing events can be opened and closed in less than 10 seconds! No doubt that this year promises to bring exponential growth to Keelvar and its customers. 

Interactive Workshops and Breakout Sessions

The afternoon was jam packed with 6 workshops and 2 customer roundtables. 

A couple of the sessions were centered around a topic which is certainly getting a lot of attention at the moment: AI Agents. Specifically, participants explored how AI Agents can enhance the sourcing process across different sourcing categories. Supplier section and bid execution emerged as areas of focus for AI-driven improvements. 

Another highlight was Keelvar’s brand new ‘battle of the bidders’ workshop which encouraged participants to put themselves in the shoes of suppliers by splitting into groups and bidding against each other in real time. The key takeaway, running multiple rounds of bidding and being transparent always drives price compression – so don’t leave money on the table! In between rounds, host Jack Dillane demonstrated his strategy for evaluating scenarios making this workshop incredibly insightful for procurement professionals juggling many objectives. 

Partnerships 

We’re proud to be part of a tight-knit network of best-of-breed partners. The last workshops of the day were hosted by Zip, DAT, EcoVadis, and excelerated, where they all covered topics such as procurement orchestration, freight benchmarking, and building sustainable supply chains. 

This was a particularly important feature of this edition of Keelvar Konect, as Alan also announced the creation of ProcureTex – an event where procurement professionals can learn how to build their own interoperable and scalable tech stak from best-of-breed solutions to lead with strategy instead of struggling with legacy tools.

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Knowledge sharing is core to Keelvar’s mission of achieving and scaling sourcing excellence. That is the driving force behind Keelvar Konnect, and we feel this edition was another fantastic display of community, learning, and connection. 

If you’d like to be part of the next one, register here! 

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