September Roundtable Discussion Highlights: AI Strategies and Pitfalls

September 11th, 2025, Executive Roundtables for purchasing leaders

The theme of this C-level Executive Roundtable was on AI strategies that are delivering results and pitfalls to avoid.  Highlights of the roundtable discussion are summarized below. 

  • President of an electronics supplier to automotive and commercial truck industries shared that their organization has not implemented AI yet. They are upgrading their ERP system to enable some AI capabilities. They believe they are missing opportunities to mine their data for forecasting, etc. 
  • Vice President of a global datatech company shared that in their experience, custom implementations combining functionality from multiple elements in the tech stack deliver AI implementation results. 

    They recommended starting an AI implementation by considering a long-term vision (“art of the possibility” and other company use cases) as well as a short-term focus on solving specific issues. 

    They also recommended that when speaking with AI vendors, asking for example use cases and introductions to pas customer to learn from their experience. 
  • Chief Supply Chain Officer of an $11B building materials manufacturer shared they view as AI as a tool for leveraging data faster and more precisely. Their AI strategy has specific focuses for the operations team, sales team, and technical team. It clearly defines what they will not be doing. 

    They shared that with AI, the company is handling 3X the workload with one-fifth of the process engineers. For procurement, they shared that they have replaced 30% of category management work with AI for tasks such as category analytics and should-cost models.  They shared that their company uses both Gemini and ChatGPT, and they’ve found that their private ChatGPT does a better job with information form outside the company, but the enterprise ChatGPT is very smart with internal information. 

    They recommended that executives focus on use cases when implementing AI – define a problem, search for a solution, then move on to the next problem.