How AI-driven procurement is transforming strategic value at Bristol Myers Squibb and Invesco

Global companies Bristol Myers Squibb and Invesco are redefining procurement by leveraging agentic AI, prioritising user experience, and achieving rapid, measurable savings, turning a long-criticised back-office function into a strategic advantage.

Procurement teams at two global companies transformed a long-criticised back-office function into a strategic advantage by pairing executive mandates with agentic artificial intelligence, rapid delivery and a relentless focus...

At Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) and asset manager Invesco, leaders concluded that the traditional purchase-to-pay choreography , slow, manual and tolerated only because it was familiar , had to be overhauled. Both organisations appointed new chief procurement officers with explicit remits to change how procurement operated: Paula Glickenhaus at BMS sought to “rewire” the function, while Al Williams at Invesco aimed to elevate procurement from tactical operations to a driver of enterprise value by expanding spend under management and accelerating savings. According to the SupplyChainBrain case study, these mandates set a clear line of accountability that made rapid change possible.

Rather than beginning with long data-cleaning programmes or heavyweight systems projects, both teams prioritised making the process markedly easier for business users. Rhonda Spraker Griscti, BMS’s executive director of digital strategy and global process lead, said that a UX-led approach created organisational “pull” for new tools where previously procurement had had to “push” compliance through cumbersome systems. That shift in emphasis turned friction into adoption: complex requests for proposals that once layered months of email could be created in under 30 minutes on a native agentic AI sourcing platform, a change described as “delightful” by the authors of the case study.

Invesco followed the same maxim, building a “single front door” for sourcing to eliminate the thousands of manual emails that had accumulated annually. Clare Cassano, head of procurement strategy and execution at Invesco, encapsulated the business case for AI simply: “We needed a force multiplier.” Her team also emphasised pragmatism over perfection, flipping the conventional data playbook by allowing AI to augment and cleanse records in real time rather than waiting for ideal inputs.

That pragmatic, iterative posture produced results in weeks rather than quarters. At BMS the new approach enabled the company to insource source-to-contract activities with roughly half the headcount at half the cost compared with previous outsourced arrangements, operate 70% faster than that provider and scale RFP activity tenfold. Ambitions to process $100m of spend through the chosen platform in year one were substantially exceeded; the case study reports more than $1bn processed in ten months. At Invesco, Cassano’s team delivered two and a half times their baseline savings target and moved from zero to live with an AI-powered sourcing capability in weeks by deploying the platform as a standalone before full orchestration integration. “The best decision we made early in the process was that whilst we wanted to integrate Globality with our orchestration layer, we were able to turn it on far faster and have it operating as a standalone,” Cassano said. “It literally was weeks, from a standing start, [with] no sourcing solution at all, to having Globality up and running.”

Executives framed the technology as liberation rather than replacement: routine, error-prone work such as spreadsheet-driven tendering and high-volume email exchanges was automated, freeing procurement professionals for higher-order analysis and stakeholder engagement. That redefinition of roles helped reposition procurement internally from a compliance gatekeeper to a contributor of measurable financial impact , a transformation the case study characterises as turning procurement into a “Department of Yes.”

The experience at BMS sits alongside the company’s broader embrace of digital and AI across R&D, manufacturing and commercial activities. According to BMS materials, the company has been integrating digital technologies to accelerate research and supply-chain processes and, with partners, is deploying generative and predictive AI in multiple areas. Recent collaborations and initiatives cited by the company include AI-enabled drug discovery partnerships and a generative AI medical content hub launched with Accenture to speed physician-facing content creation. Other industry tie-ups announced publicly show BMS engaging with external AI vendors to identify therapeutic candidates and clinical signals, underscoring that the procurement changes are part of a wider digital strategy.

The leaders driving the procurement programmes distilled their lessons into simple counsel. Spraker Griscti urged organisations to “Don’t wait until you have perfect data. If you wait, you’ll never get started”, while Cassano’s recommendation was equally direct: “just do it”. The two case studies together make a pragmatic argument: when executives set unambiguous goals, invest in user experience and permit an iterative data strategy, AI can unlock rapid, measurable value in large, complex procurement operations and reduce exposure to ongoing market and geopolitical uncertainty.

Source: Noah Wire Services