Horizon 2025 North America User Conference – September 22-24 (Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, CA)
After a few years away, I am excited to share with the CPO Rising community that I will be returning to Zycus’ Horizon 2025, the provider’s North American user conference next week. Horizon has long been a fixture on the procurement technology calendar, and I’ve had the privilege of attending roughly ten times over the years. Each year, the Zycus team curates its unique annual event somewhat off the beaten path and paced at the beat of its own drummer (this is a compliment, I mean to say that Horizon is never a plain vanilla event). For me, Horizon has always been an opportunity to engage directly with procurement leaders that are reshaping their organizations with new solutions in a calm and serene setting.
This year, the event theme is Beyond the Tide: Surfing the New Wave of Procurement, which is a timely theme and one that leverages Zycus’ focus in recent years on embedding artificial intelligence into its Source-to-Pay suite.
A Familiar Event with New Urgency
Over the past decade, Horizon has delivered consistently by blending expert perspectives, real world experiences, and the latest innovations from the host company. The sessions, networking, and shared learning have made it one of the better events for procurement executives in North America, particularly those looking to benchmark their operations and understand emerging technology trends. It’s an interesting time to return to Horizon because Zycus has been laser-focused on AI for many years and the market now catching up. I expect the pace of change within the ProcureTech arena to accelerate dramatically over the next three years. Perhaps not surprisingly, I will be presenting on this topic as I build a case for how Agentic AI can become a catalyst for procurement transformation and savings.
Why Agentic AI Matters Now
AI in procurement is not new and its certainly not new to readers of CPO Rising and Zycus customers. For many years, Ardent Partners has tracked AI in its many forms. For years we discussed the emergence and growth of Industry 4.0 technologies (which were all rebranded as AI after the launch of the big Generative AI (Large Language Model) websites).
The next step in this evolution is agentic AI. Building on LLMs, planning algorithms, and reinforcement learning, agentic AI enables systems to pursue goals, take independent actions, and adjust strategies dynamically. Unlike GenAI, which focuses on generating content, agentic AI emphasizes autonomy and the ability to adapt and iterate in response to changing conditions. Agentic is a new frontier in applied AI for procurement. My presentation will explore the emerging role of agentic AI in procurement, highlight how autonomous agents can impact
operations and results and includes recommendations on where to begin using it and how to track its impact.
If you are interested in this topic and others like that, It’s not too late to register.
And, if you’re already booked or planning to attend, drop me a note and we can connect on Southern Cal next week!
