Clemencia Vera

Special Guest Blog Post written by Matt McKinney, Co-Founder and CEO of Loop   I spend most of my time with supply chain and innovation leaders at major enterprises who are sitting on significant AI budgets but struggling to show measurable business impact in an increasingly complex and volatile supply chain environment.   These conversations have evolved dramatically. A year ago, executives were asking basic questions about AI feasibility. Today, the questions have shifted to strategic implementation at enterprise scale.   Based on hundreds of these discussions, three questions consistently emerge that separate companies making transformational progress from those stuck in pilot purgatory.   How do we move from AI experiments to enterprise-scale impact?   Most organizations have yet to see organization-wide, bottom-line impact from AI use. This is the strategic challenge keeping C-suite leaders awake at night.   The problem isn’t the technology. It’s the application of the technology. Too many enterprises are trying to treat AI like a magic wand they can bolt onto existing systems. But garbage in, garbage out. If your underlying data is fragmented and inconsistent, AI won’t solve your problems; in fact they’ll get worse.   At its core, anything automated is powered by…

At the Gartner Supply Chain Planning Summit in Denver, Scott Luton sat down with Nari Viswanathan, a veteran innovator in the planning and procurement technology space and a key leader at Coupa. The two reconnected after several recent collaborations—including webinars, industry sessions, and conversations in Dallas—and discussed the new realities of supply chain planning and how organizations are embracing technology like never before.   Coupa and Autonomous Spend Management For those less familiar with Coupa, Viswanathan explained the company as the global leader in autonomous spend management—a framework that brings together direct and indirect spending to help organizations manage total spend more intelligently. Direct spend, of course, is where supply chain operations come into focus, making planning, design, and cost optimization central to the value Coupa delivers. Viswanathan leads Coupa’s global supply chain strategy, shaping how the company positions and scales its solutions across the market. After years spent in supply chain planning technology, he now sits at the intersection of procurement, supply chain, and advanced analytics—an area he believes has never been more exciting or more critical.   Old Problems, New Pressures—and a Greater Willingness to Innovate When asked about the biggest challenges facing planners today, Viswanathan emphasized a…