The 2026 State of Autonomous Sourcing

So that's interesting, and, and it leads me to think about, you know, pilot jail and the fact that there's a lot of organizations which are stuck, you know, have, have delivered a pilot in a test environment or in a sandbox, giving interesting first results.

But to your point, right, it might be more complex to, to implement, uh, or to get everybody aligned on what you need to scale this to the enterprise level, uh, although I'm sure you have clients that have done that.

So I'd be really interested to get your take on, like, why do people get stuck in pilot jail, specifically in autonomous sourcing, and what do they need to do to get out of there and to scale these types of solutions?

It's a really good question, and we actually have a session today with our friends from Liberty Blue talking about that very same topic, right? Why do some pilots fail to get their wings? That's actually the, uh, the name of the session.

There's a couple of simple principles behind why that is in our view.

Uh, pilots are structured to succeed from a technology evaluation standpoint.

Um, we generally see customers choosing the friendliest categories, the ones that require perhaps less change to test the new, uh, technology with the friendliest teams.

It's essentially a process that is designed to survive for weeks, for months, for a year, however the, the length of the, of the pilot is.

Um, getting the pilot to essentially move into the production, into the business as usual, it's not a technology question.

It's a procedural question.

Can the customer make the necessary changes within their processes, within their teams, uh, to operate with the new business as usual, um, that ultimately takes advantage of the tool? As I and a lot of customers would, would attest to this, I tell customers all the time that if you buy a new tool and operate the old way, all that you have is a very expensive paperweight.

Yeah.

You won't be able to take advantage of it.

And pilots, while they're great to validate the technology- They often don't put emphasis on validating the necessary, uh, change management process changes, governance changes that are necessary for the new normal of the organization.

I find that's a great insight, right? Like, if you're gonna be p- testing the technology, how can you also test the new org structure, the new roles and responsibilities, right? Without changing all the HR role, role descriptions and roles and responsibilities, even though you're operating with a friendly-- Well, hopefully, you're operating with a friendly business unit or a friendly, uh, category that's simpler to manage, but I think that's a great insight, right? It's like, as you're designing pilots or IT is forcing you to run a pilot, how do you also do the, the business transformation pilot at the same time to set yourself up for success once it's time to deploy this thing to the rest of the organization, and already know where you're gonna have those change management hiccups, right? Where you're gonna have to put more, more effort around supplier enablement or potentially, you know, de-decentralized model where you have to retrain and, and get people to rethink about how they execute their work.

Exactly.

Very cool.