Bob Murphy, CPO at IBM, said his team was using IBM’s supercomputer “as much as we can” to improve its contribution to the business.

He said his team had created a “cognitive journey map” of IBM’s procurement processes to see where AI can assist. “We have access to enormous amounts of data, requests from our stakeholders, PO data, invoice date to the data that’s on the internet. For us in procurement, data and data awareness are absolutely huge.

“It’s not that we want to replace humans. We want to leverage automation and technology to help guide us to make better, more important decisions,” he said.

Murphy has been at IBM for 40 years and has been CPO for the last four. IBM runs procurement both for itself and for around 50 companies, and Murphy’s team manages more than $300bn in total.

“The first day I joined procurement I knew I wanted to be the CPO,” he said. “For me procurement is awesome, procurement is fun. We all have a job and a role in convincing the millennials and the talent coming in how awesome and impactful procurement is.”

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