What Modern Sourcing Looks Like When AI Does the Heavy Lifting
Stan Garber, Levelpath's President and Co-Founder, was joined by John Eustis, Sr. Vice President of U.S. Group Procurement at Toray, and Libby Sestak, Levelpath's Sr. Principal of AI and Solutions, to walk through the state of AI, the changing procurement landscape, and the path ahead.
John offered a real look at what AI adoption looks like inside a global manufacturer. Toray Americas manages 7,500+ active U.S. vendors across nine operating companies with a five-person center of excellence team. With such a complex procurement system, they needed to scale with AI. John talked about how AI is being discussed at the C-suite level, how his team decided where to start, what stood out about Levelpath during their evaluation, and what Toray has already been able to stand up in the platform.
Stan added context on where AI has moved in just the past few years, from basic chatbots answering questions to AI Agents running full sourcing events, and Libby closed with a live demo of the Levelpath Sourcing Agent that showed the room what an agentified process actually looks like end to end.
What Senior Procurement Leaders Are Asking About AI
On Tuesday, Stan joined an ExecIn panel, "Shaping the Intelligent Supply Chain: Perspectives from AI Expert Solution Providers," designed to give senior leaders a candid market lens from solution providers in the trenches helping enterprises move from experimentation to scaled AI adoption.
The panelists covered the questions procurement leaders are navigating right now: Which guardrails matter in practice? What are the data and contractual considerations? What are the real blockers to AI adoption versus the perceived ones?
Stan talked about what it takes to actually operationalize AI in procurement: tracking new KPIs (percentage of the team using AI, number of workflows automated, number of agents deployed) and building an Agent Ops function where someone on the team owns the agent workflows and keeps them running well. That is the difference between teams experimenting with AI and teams scaling it.
The ISM Booth That Started Real Conversations
We ran a huge digital video wall at the booth this year, looping live demo content, customer results, and a closer look at what our AI Agents actually do. AI Agents, and how to implement AI at scale, was the common thread of conversation.
The question every procurement leader is now being asked by their CEO is: what is your AI plan? Attendees who came to our booth wanted a real answer, not a theoretical one. They wanted to know which processes to automate first, how to measure AI adoption, and what "agentified procurement" actually looks like day to day.
That is exactly what Levelpath is built to answer. Our AI Agents work across the full procurement lifecycle, from sourcing and contracts to supplier management and intake, so teams can start with one workflow and scale from there. A platform that puts AI to work on real procurement processes, with the context and controls to do it well.
What ISM World Showed About the Future of Procurement
ISM World 2026 confirmed something we have been hearing from customers for months. The conversation has moved past "should we use AI?" and landed squarely on "how do we scale it?"
Procurement teams want new skills, including training and hands-on experience with AI tools. They need new roles, like the Agent Ops Manager, to own agent workflows. They should be judged on new metrics: percentage of the team using AI, number of workflows automated, number of agents deployed.
If you want to see what AI Agents can do for your procurement, book a demo of Levelpath today.
–Rose
