• How can you shift from viewing the contingent workforce as a transactional labour supply to managing it as a strategic enterprise capability?
• How can you design governance, ownership and cross-functional alignment to improve visibility, compliance and workforce engagement?
• How can you build a roadmap for workforce programme maturity to integrate new technologies and align with the business?

A high-energy twist on the classic game show, this session sees CPOs tested on procurement insight, instinct, and nerve — with the audience voting in real time to challenge the panel and crown the ultimate winner.

• AI
• Talent
• Cost Savings
• Risk & War
• Stakeholder Management

• How can you shift procurement from price-led savings to value levers spanning risk and innovation?
• How can you simplify vendor complexity to unlock speed, resilience, and scalable value delivery?
• How can you influence senior stakeholders to embed procurement as a strategic value partner, not a cost-cutting function?

• How can you create a collaborative environment to share best practices, tools and unlock visibility amongst suppliers to meet your goals?
• How can you unlock ESG & sustainability as a tool to create multi-dimensional value that far exceeds simple cost savings?
• How do you quantify and communicate the importance of sustainable procurement decisions to secure long-term internal buy-in to have procurement act as a force for good?
• What example would you give a skeptical CFO to show ESG driving both savings and impact, considering the short-term pressure on savings?

FOR:

• Always-on optimisation: Autonomous agents analyse real-time data, continuously refining negotiation strategies beyond human bandwidth
• Emotion-free decision making: AI removes bias and fatigue, driving fact-based, margin-focused outcomes
• Scalable leverage: Multi-agent systems can run parallel negotiations across categories, unlocking speed and consistency at scale

AGAINST:

• Negotiation is human: Trust, nuance and relationship capital cannot be replicated by algorithms
• Context is king: AI lacks the commercial judgement to navigate grey areas, power dynamics and cultural nuance
• Risk and reputation: Unsupervised agents increase exposure to compliance, ethical and regulatory failures

Hear from our expert chair and former CPO, Richard Beaumont, for his expert summary of ProcureCon to ensure you have a clear summary of the key learnings for you to take back to your office on Monday!