Must see DPW Amsterdam Sessions

{{current_date_full}} · FIELD NOTES

Hey {{first_name}}

I’ve been going through the DPW Amsterdam agenda, trying to work out which AI sessions might actually be worth paying attention to.

AnD I’m hyped about going to DPW this year with team Pactum. I don’t think I’ll get to go to many sessions, but the stage I like is the Discovery stage.

Yes it has vendors with their customers on stage.

But it’s usually independently moderated, and that makes a huge difference to the credibility of the conversation.

The Personio one immediately caught my eye.

They have a procurement team of three, supported by more than 400 automations and 20 agents. The claim is that they are doing the work of a team four times that size, while spending roughly €600 a month on the setup.

I’ve seen people from the Personio team, on the marketing side, speak about automation a few times over the past couple of years, and I assumed there must be a fair amount of n8n behind it.

There is.

The team has built its own setup using a mixture of Make and n8n. Their PO agent apparently completes 90% of cases without anyone needing to touch them again. It is a properly interesting model: a procurement team building much of its own technology instead of waiting for IT or buying another large platform.

Those numbers almost sound too good, which is exactly why I want to see the session. I’ve built in n8n, Make, for Marketing, and used Zapier to run procurement previously so I’m all for it.

The other two on my list are AstraZeneca and Rolls-Royce. Both use Pactum, which is worth disclosing upfront as I work there but I call these out as a recommendation: Go see the people doing incredible things with AI today and learn how they achieve it.

AstraZeneca has integrated a Pactum agent into Coupa and says it has reduced requisition checks from two days to less than 90 seconds.

What makes that story more credible is that they are also talking about the work behind it: three years spent sorting out data, systems and skills, including upskilling more than 600 people.

Rolls-Royce started with agents in indirect procurement and is now looking at what this model could do in direct procurement. The programme has already been reported as delivering 2× ROI (that was over a year ago too - before my time).

That is fairly insane.

I don’t particularly want to hear another discussion about what AI might do for procurement one day. I want these teams to open the bonnet and show us what is running, what it costs, where people still intervene and what has gone wrong along the way.

If DPW gets us that, these three sessions will be worth watching.

That’s it this week.

Speak next week,

Daniel