A Truly Digital Supply Chain and Learning From History with Ivalua’s Stephen Carter

Episode Overview

Our Guest: Stephen Carter – Leveraging AI in Supply Chain of Procurement

Stephen Carter is a seasoned professional with over 30 years of experience in the technology and product marketing industry, currently serving as the Director of Product Marketing at Ivalua. His career spans various high-profile roles across different organizations, such as Crown Commercial Service and Basware, where he significantly contributed to the fields of procurement and spend management. At Ivalua, Stephen leverages his extensive expertise to drive innovative solutions that streamline procurement processes, ensuring businesses can operate more efficiently and effectively in a rapidly evolving digital landscape​​​​.

In addition to his professional achievements, Stephen is a passionate historian, focusing on the life and times of the Duke of Monmouth and the art of war in the 17th century. He has authored several books, using historical procurement and finance records to offer a unique perspective on historical events. His dual interest in history and technology allows him to draw insightful parallels between historical and modern business challenges, providing a fresh lens through which to view contemporary issues in procurement and supply chain management​​​​.

Stephen’s approach to product marketing at Ivalua is informed by his deep understanding of both historical and modern procurement challenges. He advocates for the adoption of AI in supply chain management, emphasizing its potential to revolutionize traditional processes and drive greater efficiency. His insights are not only grounded in his extensive industry experience but are also enriched by his historical research, making him a thought leader in both fields. Stephen continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in procurement, aiming to create a more dynamic and responsive digital supply chain landscape​​​​.

Episode Transcript

Kevin Rosenquist: Your specialty is very specific. What? What drew you to these subjects? Hey, welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for listening. Stephen Carter is the director of product marketing for Ivalua , a leading provider of cloud-based procurement and spend management software that helps businesses manage their entire procurement process efficiently. He’s also a historian and has written four books, with a fifth on the way, his focus being on the life and times of the Duke of Monmouth, as well as the art of war in the 17th century. He is vocal about the need for the procurement world to adopt technology so the world can finally go paperless through a truly digital supply chain driven by payments. We talk about supply-chain products and how businesses can learn from history to look at problems through a new lens. Joining me now, Stephen Carter. You’re an author and historian and an expert on the life and times of the Duke of Monmouth, as well as the art of war in the 17th century. You’ve written three books and have a fourth on the way. Your specialty is very specific. What drew you to these subjects?

Stephen Carter: Basically, it’s a lifetime’s passion. I just love, history, I just enjoy the whole concept of learning about people and learning about times and periods, and, I’ve really been drawn towards this particular niche, if you, because, it’s a bit that’s been ignored pretty much. It’s just great to be able to dive into a subject and then become a little bit of an expert on that subject as well. So, I could probably say I’m one of a handful of people who know this subject, that historical period inside out from that perspective, and in particular the Duke of Monmouth and his mother. So, it’s it’s just fun, really. It’s just good to be able to release and work on a period in history and just let stuff go.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s an interesting way to look at it. it’s sort of like when you watch a biopic of somebody and it spans their entire life. You don’t really ever get to be fully immersed into it, where you’re taking a situation and being fully immersed into what was going on at that time period and the people involved.

Stephen Carter: Absolutely. You so there’s a sort of several layers of these sort of things, there’s a high-level thing where you can see the biopic and it’s very it’s like the film Napoleon. It’s like trying to get a man’s life in that is really powerful. Over 20 years into 2 hours or 3 hours, it’s impossible. It’s impossible. So I go into the detail of what was happening, I really look at the timelines and try and debunk some of the myths that happen as well in history, because there’s so much mythology that’s built up around it, because people do take that generalist view that you lose the real detail, actually the beauty of the person, the character is in the detail, not in that high-level perspective. So I enjoy that angle of it and learning new things and looking at, the original documents, not what people think was there.

Kevin Rosenquist: Why is this particular time period so under, under-researched, or not talked about very much?

Stephen Carter: I think it’s a bit like most things in the world. It’s a transitional period. So it’s, it’s dwarfed between two big periods. You’ve got like the, the restoration period and King Charles the Second and the sort of the, the Mary Monarch stuff going on, then after that, you sort of get into the sort of the, the Age of Enlightenment with, developments around, people and science and stuff, this middle period is actually the transition from the two, there’s no real such thing as a transition. It’s just a continuous cycle. But a lot of the things that we take for granted now actually were invented or discovered or thought about in this particular period, and we just don’t realize it, you know? So, I was, he is Newton, for example, he was in this period, but people don’t think of him as think of him as a later person if that makes sense. So it’s a period that lots happened. A lot of learning took place, a lot of global learning as well, but it’s almost been ignored because there are big things on either side of it, it’s like the gap. But actually, the gap is the most exciting part for me because it’s a bit thanks to changes in the transition period.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s really cool. I love history myself, but since this is not a history podcast, I’ll steer us away before we go off the rails. I want to read something from your LinkedIn page. I know it’s kind of lame to cite a guest-linked LinkedIn page while you’re interviewing him, but this caught my attention. My aim is to finally see the world go paperless, not by e-invoicing, but through a truly digital supply chain driven by payments. What do you mean by that?

Stephen Carter: The too much of our focus and too much technology we see in the AP world accounts payable world today is based upon old school thinking. It’s based upon, the classic you have to scan an invoice, it’s a piece of paper. Then you have to follow a paper process style process to get that. Approved and paid, when you think about what our real lives are like today, you know if we did that in our human lives and our personal lives, it would be chaos, we just don’t do it anymore. we have instant banking. We we changed our lives to reflect that instant banking world and instant payment world. Whereas the business world is still stuck in this old school where we’ve got to follow a paper process, and so much of the technology investment people make is around the scanning or old-school invoice networks, which don’t really fix the problem. whereas I’m a historian, so I know that things go through in cycles, in the old days, when I started work back in the distant past, when it was wax tablets, the process was human-based, the people would talk to each other, collaborate, and you’d get an invoice in, and then you’d pay it, you’d process it and pay it.

Stephen Carter: We now have all these technology layers in place that have broken that direct connection between the supplier and the buyer, and things are only going to get worse if you the people don’t think digitally because governments are moving to digital tax, governments are moving to networks where they control the flow of the invoice so they can monitor what tax is due to them as a government. Ultimately, they can reduce fraud, they can predict their income, or ultimately their business in that respect for their income, but also then check there are no issues with that, that transaction, that trade, they want to have that electronically. So they’re moving to that school of moving. So lots of countries in Europe are going that way, globally in fact Middle East and Singapore, etc. Where the supplier sends the invoice to the government. The government says, this is a true invoice, this is the tax on that invoice, then the supplier sends it to the buyer, and then the buyer has a paper process to process that electronic invoice. What’s the point? if you think about it logically, they can get this invoice in there. They can get it processed in seconds, and then they’ve got the whole payment window to manage their cash more effectively and pay the supplier with a discount.

Stephen Carter: If they can pay early or pay exactly the right time. They’re chronic funds transfer with E-banking. There’s no, why sit on your cash for seven days and send a check if you’re in the Americas or, pay them over three days with the batch process, or you can do it instantly and just manage your cash more effectively, than the old-school mentality of paper, it’s to break that. You have to really go, but how is a more efficient way I can get an invoice in from the government tomorrow? I can then make sure that my people can see that I’ve got the right items and goods, and it’s never going to be the Po. It’s going to be other things that you need to check as well, then I’ve got that point onwards to look at how I use my capital in the most efficient way. It’s sort of obvious, really, but I’ve got this sort of mentality. I’ve got to do how I used to do it. How I’ve done it for the last 30 years. I’ve got to keep on doing it that way, it’s just broken. Is it?

Kevin Rosenquist: Is it intimidation? Are they intimidated and are people intimidated by trying to change their process? Are they nervous? Are they do they fear it or are they just lazy? Like what is probably a combination of everything, I suppose.

Stephen Carter: I think it’s a combination of accounts payable tends to be quite conservative in their thinking, very sort of set ways in the way of thinking, a lot of the vendors in the market, particularly the sort of ERP vendors, the enterprise resource planning people, they haven’t really opened the door to a digital thinking process, so a lot of the organizations we work with that use a valuer, they’ve got digital processes everywhere except the accounts payable because they’re scared, if you, of shifting it into a dynamic process. not because the technology isn’t there, but because it’s almost, I wouldn’t I don’t want to say fear. It’s not really fear. It’s more that they haven’t seen the benefits yet, I’ve been around long enough to remember all the promises made to ribbon networks and tungsten and all that sort of stuff where the PO flipped when it would be instant and the network invoice networks would fixed world hunger, they never delivered, a lot of people in AP have been burned 3 or 4 times with that story. So when they’re told, we’ve got a better solution. It’s this, this and this. They go, well, we tried that. Five years got burnt, and it didn’t really work, which then creates them being a bit more skeptical about the process, skeptics tend to sit back and need to be drawn out into the conversation, and AP people once they become skeptical. Technology people struggle to get to them and get them engaged, that’s probably why we’re guilty as much as they are, of not engaging with this process and seeing the value of a digital journey.

Kevin Rosenquist: So it’s like there’s been some failures in the past. So let’s just go back to the tried and true kind of thing.

Stephen Carter: Exactly, the and we, I think I’m guilty says I said for. 20 odd years. There was talk of the inverse network fixing these things, and it never did, we promoted it as being the way to fix it, that was 20 years ago, before the internet, before the power of the internet and the cloud technology. It was the obvious solution. Analysts and customers can’t see that that’s now had its day, it’s actually it’s a bit, what I think of it in history, we’re waffling a little bit here, but it’s evolutionary and, technology fixes problems with technology if that makes sense. So you fix the current technology with the next bit of technology, to break that cycle, you have to think about what I’m trying to achieve, not fix the technology, but fix how I work, that’s that’s where we where AI comes in, because that is going to change how you work, and be more efficient. So why do you need this old way of doing it? and it is that that simple, simple thing that, technology, if your technology is a sticking plaster and you add layers of layers of technology and then something like cloud comes along and blows it away. But if you don’t embrace that and realize that your old investment in a network is wasted, you need to break and realize that and say, okay, I need to move forward now and just remove that redundant that, legacy for life or that we like to call it technical debt. It’s like a commercial business debt they’ve built up, invested heavily in something. It’s very hard to let go of that.

Kevin Rosenquist: Definitely. I’ve talked to other people on the show about how AI is sort of forcing people to change and kind of, in a good way, a lot of ways to change and get more modern with their technology because it’s, well, if we don’t adopt this now, we’re going to be for real behind.

Stephen Carter: Yes, absolutely. You’re going to be you’re going to become you’re going to lose your use your track and you’ll wherever you are in the business process, if you’re a leader or a follower or whatever, if you don’t start to look at this and embrace this as an opportunity, then you will lag behind dramatically, that that’s a big risk for people.

Kevin Rosenquist: you’ve spent much of your career in product marketing. Do you find similarities between researching and writing the historical book and planning the market marketing strategy for a product?

Stephen Carter: Yes. writing a book is a product marketing strategy.

Stephen Carter: The whole thing. Writing a book is a is a is a product. I’m creating a product I’m just having to write. So you need to do all the other things associated with the product, alongside, the writing, the marketing of it, thinking about the media strategy. You think about the audience who’s going to be reading it. all those things are, are it’s a product and you have to think of it as a product. Ultimately, it’s not just me enjoying myself. I’m thinking about the audience, how it’s going to sell, who it’s going to sell to, where it’s sold. All those things come into that, that, that picture.

Kevin Rosenquist: Probably each one helps the other, maybe even, writing a book helps your, marketing strategy, and the marketing strategy helps writing a book.

Stephen Carter: It does, it’s funny actually, because when I’m, working with my publisher, I’m thinking about all these things I’m thinking about, okay, how are we going to market? How are we going to release it? How? And they’re not even there yet, I’m going, okay, that hasn’t been published it yet. I see it, but I want to get this in place so I can plan around this.

Kevin Rosenquist: You haven’t even started writing yet. I had a guest, I had a guest on who was a big fan of ancient warfare, particularly like Alexander the Great, he found he could take a lot of lessons from Alexander and the time period for his business and entrepreneurship. Do you do you pull lessons from the subjects of your books as well?

Stephen Carter: Yes, I do, and, there are a lot of interesting lessons you can learn. I think Alexander the Great or, Julius Caesar or Napoleon or my period Duke of Monmouth, and stuff. There are lots of lessons you can read just by looking at what they did how they operated and what happened around them, you can see you can see the mistakes they made. You can see the thoughts they had. but there are lots of, analogies or comparisons you could make with today and learning, for example, I’ve done a lot of work on military strategy, I was writing, my first book and my second book around, military tactics, and I was, I was researching and writing it. I was thinking, this is, so obvious in how people do their everyday lives and how they should be structuring their go-to-market, how they should be structuring their businesses. It became sort of obvious, those sorts of lessons, parallels, which is so, eye-opening in that respect.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s what’s really cool. I mean that’s that’s nice that you get to pull that kind of stuff from, from your, side business. I mean, I don’t even know what you want to call it. I mean, it’s, but it’s, it’s cool. I think that’s really respectable.

Stephen Carter: So, the other thing I did I took from my when I started writing and I really wanted to get into it. I actually did a lot of work looking at procurement processes of the 17th century to learn. I know how it works at a and all sorts of to learn how they did it and then look at all the, the documents to see actually what they bought, actually what they used, it’s fascinating when you start to do that, you can see, go back to that paper trail, the problem they had to fix was exactly the same as the problem today is technology was just helping them do it, not the way they did it if that makes sense. Exact same problem, if you realize that and you go, okay, how so? Technology is there to get me to do it faster, more efficiently, etc. not to change the problem. The problem is always there if you don’t realize that and think technology is going to fix the problem, no, because the problem is global supply chains.

Stephen Carter: The problem is getting the right goods in place, at the right time, making sure the right things are being ordered, and making sure you have innovation coming down. That is the problem of procurement. that isn’t going to change technology like AI. It’s going to make it faster and easier to see that stuff, but it’s not going to actually fundamentally change the problem. So the human condition is, is to understand how you use the tools, you’ve got to deliver the solution to those problems, that’s really that’s where sometimes we get lost. To go back to that original question you asked me about, why don’t people change is because and looking at the technology as the problem, not actually looking at the underlying root cause problem, which is my supplier or I need to get stuff through the Suez Canal. That’s the. because I’ve got a customer that wants it. That’s the real root cause of the problem, not the SAP or its Ariba or its value. Are there things to help me get that solution in place?

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a good way to look at it. Like the problem hasn’t changed. It’s just that maybe the scale of the problem has changed, and the way we attack it has certainly changed.

Stephen Carter: Yes, it has the scale there. So as a historian, my personal view is what’s changed is speed. Speed changes. So in the 17th century, I could go to America, I could do my business and I could come back again in a year. But it was a three-month journey out there and a three-month journey back. Now I get on a plane and I’m there the same day. So now we’re in an instant world where I don’t even need to go on the plane anymore. I can do it instantly with you this second. and that is the difference that is how long it takes is the thing that’s the change, and what we have to learn as humans is how to react that now instantaneous what’s going on, with AI, not just instant, it’s instant with billions of different choices to make the right choice suddenly.

Kevin Rosenquist: So it’s the differentiator. I can’t imagine being on a ship for three months. That’s, sounds like my nightmare.

Stephen Carter: I think how little how big the ships were, they were quite little as well. Yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s true. Yeah. It wasn’t like you were on a Carnival cruise, you know.

Stephen Carter: No, no, if you think, you go on a boat and you’re going, okay, I’m going to New York and I’m going to sail there, and I’ve got to wait for the right wind. Stormy in there or. It’s not just like sitting at the airport and having a delay.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. When we’re, oh my God, this is the worst day of my life. My plane was delayed half an hour.

Stephen Carter: I’m stuck at six months. That’s been.

Kevin Rosenquist: Stuck at sea for six months. That’s far worse. So speaking of procurement, the Evaluation platform is incredibly robust. One of the features is the supply chain collaboration to improve the overall efficiency. The difficulties of the supply chain certainly became more apparent to the average person during the pandemic, when everything from masks to cars became difficult to purchase. How did the pandemic influence any changes or new features that you guys, brought into the the platform?

Stephen Carter: okay. So the pandemic really accelerated the need for digital. It accelerated the need for people to be able to work remotely, I was I was shocked. When you go back to the original question when accounts payable teams were seen as key workers having to travel into the office when for years we’ve had digital technology that meant they didn’t need it, that’s a good example of this, sort of this, the forced it was a compelling event and the people were forced to rethink their process, forced to rethink it. So a lot of the work that we did during the pandemic, where I work remotely. I’ve been working remotely for probably 20 years probably. so for me, it was, it’s just it’s normal life. so what it really taught them from a supply chain perspective, it’s really encouraged organizations to think more about collaboration and how they do collaborate digitally and instantly with each other, with their supply chain, how they manage and look at risks really quickly, the Covid crisis was a was an example of for me, one of those tipping point events that forced people to change, forced people to think, the those that are now thinking, okay, I need to think digital, global. I need to have systems in place to give me that instant visibility, they’ve gone back to, okay, I don’t have a paper process, need to really look in the mirror and go, you know what happens? Because this is not going to happen again, really, I’m a believer and this is my thing where we were for the last 20 years was 30 years possibly a very safe place.

Stephen Carter: And we got very safe before that in history. It was chaos after that. Now it’s back to chaos. Disruption was normal. So actually we came out of a period of non-normal, which was the stability piece that we were in. So you know we need to get used to quickly the new normal, which is actually back to where it used to be if you’re a procurement person or in finance and you know how I have survived during the Second World War with disrupted supply chains to that level? Even the disruption we have today in the market is far less than that. But people still bought stuff. There’s the biggest period of manufacturing growth in US history, probably all in times of disrupted supply chains. So they didn’t do that with digital technology. They did that by thinking about how they did their work and how they maximized what they’ve got in their hands, I think that so to answer your initial question about what we have done as a value, well, we’ve introduced things like the collaboration messaging center that allows instant messaging, in a more efficient way. We’ve added things around like risk visibility and supplier profiling. So you can have a centralized view of what’s going on with your suppliers and anybody in the organization. Those are things that we’ve really just unlocked were there already, but people didn’t really realize they needed it. now they realize they need it. We’ve got them in the product. It’s been ultimately we’ve had the data model to support AI for years now. The use cases come around that actually customers benefit from our data model.

Kevin Rosenquist: Do you think Covid will like kind of help push your dream of a truly digital supply chain process and get rid of the paper that is does that kind of help steer us in that direction?

Stephen Carter: I think it helps. It should help those people who can think outside of, their day job to think about how they should operate more efficiently, ultimately, the tragedy of the Covid crisis is that people hadn’t taken advantage of what they had at their fingertips beforehand, that’s the tragedy, is that people didn’t see this technology they had around them. Cloud computing could be used in this way because they didn’t have practical use case experience using product marketing, so they didn’t have that use case. So Covid is now a use case, a classic use case of why you should be looking at a digital process. So did it accelerate? No. I think it just made it a more practical, tangible use case for it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Are we in the business world more prepared for Covid two if it is in relation to supply chain and procurement?

Stephen Carter: The people I talk to, yes, I think they’re now they’re opening their eyes a little bit more, they’re less focused on cutting costs and more focused on the value I think. So cost is really critical and it cost is really important. but there are some examples I can give you. One would be, for years we’ve been talking about cutting down the number of suppliers you have in your supplier base, trimming it right down, actually, depending upon your commodity, you may actually want a number of suppliers in the same space because you need the contingency to rapidly add in those capabilities, I’ll give you an example. It’s not a good example of real example ammunition manufacturing for a year. For 30 years we’ve cut it down. So the supply chains had gone down to 1 or 2 key manufacturers of artillery shells. Now the crisis is happening, we realize that suddenly we need to. The ammunition is really critical. We don’t have the supply chain robustness to suddenly accelerate the growth of the manufacturer. Those are those items. that is probably the most classic example where consolidation rationalization has created a bottleneck that organizations need to think, that’s a that’s one example that there could be others. It could be bottling or manufacturing. you’ve cut down your supply chain to one key supplier, which happens to be in the Far East. That’s not a good place to be, you need to keep all your suppliers hungry and well-fed at the same time. So they stay in business. that’s a different strategy to paying a supplier late and using the cash on the seven days if they’re going to delay them with the check. That’s a different mentality. That’s a need for a little rethink around it, isn’t it? That helps.

Kevin Rosenquist: It wouldn’t be an episode of Peapod if we didn’t talk about AI. we are. You already touched on it a little bit, but. I’d like to talk about it. Eva? Is that Eva? Is that your? The idea?

Kevin Rosenquist: Eva.

Stephen Carter: Eva.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. Your generative AI product, your website talks about how important it is for companies to leverage AI in their procurement strategies. It even uses words like critical and calls the race for procurement efficiency and a competitive edge. Relentless. Obviously, we all know AI is here to stay. People need to learn it and use it to be competitive. We kind of alluded to that earlier, but was there anything in particular you and the Evaluation team have seen that fuels the urgency that you come across, or you bring across on your website ultimately?

Stephen Carter: Ultimately, yes. So what we’re seeing is, organizations that are using AI today and we’ve got customers who are already using it in their procurement processes, are seeing benefits straight away, there’s two there are two primary benefits, and there’s another sort of a backup. The benefit, if the primary benefit is suddenly the organizations, can become far more efficient. So an individual can do more, do more, get more information, and make use of the information they’re getting to, make informed decisions about where they’re going to do, AI is not going to Reindel is not going to say, do this. The clever person needs to go, okay, I’ve got eyes. Come back with this. I need to now just validate that that’s giving you a head start. It means you’ve got to your you’ve got a big, big two, three, four-step head start from where you were without AI, you still need to be intelligent and you need to understand the value of, that information you’re getting back and that decision. Agility then means from an operational perspective, you could start to think more strategically about where you’re going to be three steps ahead. for the pandemic, which talked about it was an example of people really only being looking one step ahead of themselves.

Stephen Carter: Today you need to look three, or four steps ahead of you. You need to look at, okay, what happens if this happens? What happens if this happens? You need to have more visibility of potential challenges or risks. An AI gives you the ability to have a bit more of a forward-looking perspective, and then start to have the intelligence and knowledge to go, okay, how do I move my business to support it? the other big area that I think is critical right now is around talent, ultimately, AI is a fantastic opportunity for anybody in a procurement team or anywhere in business to grasp it, embrace it, and build their own skills to become, I use a marketing term, become sticky within their own company. It’s an opportunity people have got to become sticky to, to help their organizations grow, to become more efficient, but also to have a skill set that people are going to want for their own CVS ultimately, that talent and development then helps them as individuals shine, from a procurement perspective, allow CPO to have a better position in the boardroom.

Stephen Carter: They can look okay. Your company’s going to pivot in this direction in six months time. My procurement team is ready to support you. What do you need to do? What scenarios do you want to? They can start to be the advisor that their company needs around the future of their business, and not be reactionary to what’s just happened, right? What’s just, that to me, that is the biggest opportunity, and the most exciting part of the story is that we talked about instant messaging and instant visibility of content. Now they have the ability to have instant today and have a bit more of a view of what could be happening in a week’s time, in a month’s time, that is really when a CPO can really come to the fore of their business and go, okay, I can really shine and I can help you as a company to hit the challenges, pivot to a new market. Have you thought about this? Then that’s me is the exciting part of AI.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s interesting you touched on that. I remember when you first started hearing about, post ChatGPT and everyone was talking about the potential job loss and blah, blah, blah and all that stuff. I, I remember I had a couple of marketing podcasts I listened to, and one of them, they, they talked a lot about, people are getting pissed and mad and all this and it’s, don’t do that. Learn it, learn how it can help you learn how it can help your company, a future company, like learn how the process works, and then like that’s a great way to put it. Makes you sticky.

Stephen Carter: Absolutely, I think the other thing that AI does that alongside that stickiness and that is again, it goes back to that sort of it helps you as a person, as a company, as an organization. not to be sticky, but also from an AI perspective, it’s all about, the focus has been about job losses and all this other stuff. Actually, it’s it’s more, okay, I need if I, if I understand how this works and I’m going to use a scenario here and I’ll use this in a presentation in procurement. We’ll talk about how AI is going to do this stuff. It’s going to reduce jobs because it’s going to make us, Bob helped me answer my questions. You can answer questionnaires and score. The supplier has no one thought that the supplier is going to be using AI technology to learn the best answers to give the AI answering system. So ultimately, are you going to get AI talking to AI and a human is still going to have to be there? How do I disrupt that process to get the true answer? So unless you understand how AI works, you’re not going to see the pitfalls of just taking at face value, the information you get. we AI-generated images, there’s lots of fear around the there’s a lot of fear around that and images being generated and being misleading. But guess what? Your scores are going to come back from an AI engine that has learned what the best answer is going to be. For that question, you need to be savvy enough to learn and know what that answer looks like.

Kevin Rosenquist: Because I mean, theoretically, if you’re doing an RFP, which I used to do, I hated doing them, by the way. I would have loved to have ChatGpt, but I mean, theoretically, if everyone’s using AI for it, you should have a bunch of the same, identical pitches, AI, identical proposals. Right?

Stephen Carter: You said the old classic RFP and they’re all and yes, no answers or whatever. It explained. All the vendors are going to come back with exactly the same answers because they’re going to use it. Ultimately, we all do the same thing. it’s the technology and the people you buy from, so AI is going to be there answering these questions. The skillful, what I did when I was in a commercial. But on that side doing RFP I made sure that I know how the vendors work, I know that the AI, the one team will do the sales question, and question answers, and one team will do the IT answers, you make sure you ask the same question in a different way to both audiences, then you get a Delta answer. Yes, you can. When you ask an IT person a question, you ask a finance person a question, and the odds are they’re going to give is going to be different. Yep, then, that’s what you need to think about, that’s really going to be savvy on the RFP side to think about how to pull out the real answer, not the generated answer. The generated.

Kevin Rosenquist: When I was researching Ivalua , you guys even provide a no-code platform so businesses can build customized procurement workflows, which is really cool. How has the response been for this for that thus far?

Stephen Carter: Well, that’s what it’s all about that’s all about so I’ll give you an example. Right. I. Okay. you can now use it to code our platform. So if you’ve got a use case, I’ve got a workflow challenge. I’ve got to do this, this, and this, and I need to, I’ve got this particular problem and I’ve got this workflow challenge. I need to add in an extra few users. You could actually put that into the AI engine. It will come back with the workflow in the product to fix that problem. There’s a real power of AI that’s cool, but we give the customer the tool. We give them the no-code version, which basically means that they can move things around. They can ask those questions, it’ll generate things for them. We give them the keys. It’s like a car if you think of I shouldn’t use the car analogy because AI is going to take over driving.

Stephen Carter: Give them the keys to the car. So, we don’t take ownership of the car keys. We don’t. We give them the car and we give them the keys. We don’t just suddenly drive from A to B, that’s what that’s the route. you need to drive to work. That’s what you take. We give them the keys and they can make their own way to that, and they can make their detours. They can do what they need to deliver using that horrible analogy. Ultimately it’s all about them having control, that’s what we do with the no-code process. So they can be agile. I’m in car retail and I need to, but my boss is going to move us and it’s a real use case that moves us off to real estate. that’s a different procurement world. What are the challenges to that? Well, I need to think about how I do that. So, ask either the engine, it will come back with a process code, and you can then start to build up a workflow to support that new you need. That’s no code. Low code.

Kevin Rosenquist: No code. That stuff is really, really cool. I wonder if we’re going to see more of that from companies who develop an effective AI product to offer it as a no-code build upon. I haven’t seen that a ton., I don’t know if I’ve seen it at all since, aside from evolution. Yeah.

Stephen Carter: To be honest, it’s it’s, it’s been like one of those, I said about Delta questions. if you ask anybody in procurement, do you have a single platform? They say, Do you have a single data model? Well, this is an example of what the exposes, the falsehoods aligned to the cover. Because if you don’t have AI, if you don’t have a true data model that’s common across the whole process, you don’t have a true user experience common across processes, and you don’t have the same code base across the process, then you can’t do it. So for organizations, some organizations to get this point, they can have to redevelop their platforms to actually do what they say they do today, that’s going to be the big divide if you, because some companies are not just can’t do it because they. Don’t have the data models, they don’t have the actual platforms that they say they have to do it, that’s what’s going to be the big, big differentiation moving forward.

Kevin Rosenquist: So, set companies apart.

Kevin Rosenquist: Absolutely. Tell me about your next book.

Stephen Carter: Well, my next book is um the one that’s already gone to the publishers. It’s going to come out in June, that’s about that’s volume two of my son Brahms, a book all about how to be a general, basically. but my the book I’m actually writing the moment is the biography of of Duke of Monmouth’s mother, Lucy Walter, it’s actually Lucy has become the other woman in my life. I’ve got my wife and I got Lucy.

Stephen Carter: But she grew up with that. I probably spend more time with Lucy at the moment. I do with my wife. but I don’t say that, obviously. but, there’s Lucy. Walter. It’s for me. It’s really, really important because she’s a character that’s been maligned by history, and done a lot of research over the last 20 years, I found, well, I found that she’s not the person that people think she is. Put it that way.

Kevin Rosenquist: Oh. All right. You said the wind and wind. You were just writing this one. So this one’s not. Doesn’t have a date yet.

Stephen Carter: It’ll be out tonight. It’s I’ve got to get it finished this month. Hopefully, that’s what the publisher wants me to do.

Stephen Carter: Hopefully, it’ll be done by the end of June, it’ll be published then in July next year. But it will be. The reason is, was the Duke of Monmouth was illegitimate or was he legitimate or was he illegitimate? That’s the big question. if he was legitimate, that meant Lucy Walter needed to be married to King Charles. That is the question my book is going to answer.

Kevin Rosenquist: Ah, I love it.

Stephen Carter: Little teaser there. so a bit of a teaser and, um. Yep, it’s I’m just writing it at the moment, so it’s quite exciting.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s awesome. Well, good luck. I hope it goes well. Stephen Carter, with Ivalua . Thanks for being here, I appreciate it.

Stephen Carter: It’s a pleasure. It was great to talk to you.

Kevin Rosenquist: You as well. You as well.