Q&A: David Khuat-Duy, Ivaluaās CEO-turned-Chief AI Officer
Implementing AI at scale is no mean feat.
But for one exec, pivoting his focus at his US$1bn spend management tech unicorn from general leadership to AI-centric management has been critical to its success moving forward.
David Khuat-Duy is the Founder and former CEO of Ivalua.
An engineer by training, David set up Ivaula at the turn of the millennium and in the 25 years since has grown it into a procurement software giant.
Ivalua’s AI-powered spend management software helps customers across the world — from IKEA to Volkswagen and Bulgari — to effectively manage spend and suppliers, increasing profitability, improving sustainability, lowering supply chain risk and boosting employee productivity.
David has witnessed a lot of change in the last quarter of a century at the helm of Ivalua and, with plenty more change on the horizon as AI’s capabilities grow, has moved over to become its first Chief AI Officer (CAIO).
In this Q&A with Technology Magazine, David shares how Ivalua is furthering its AI capabilities to enhance its offerings to customers, as well as optimise its own operations, and emphasises the importance of leadership working AI into their business strategies.
Please introduce yourself and your role
I'm the Founder and previously the CEO of Ivalua, roles I’ve held for more than 25 years.
Ivalua is a SaaS software company operating in the spend management market. We offer a full Source-to-Pay suite on one platform.
Our big differentiator is that we have a very powerful and flexible platform, allowing us to address any type of spend for all suppliers — across indirect and direct procurement.
We've been growing strongly and have been profitable since day one. Now, we mainly serve any type of enterprise, but we're specialists for large and complex organisations because of the flexibility of our platform.
How have you seen Ivalua's use of AI grow throughout your tenure?
We've been working on AI now for many years, applying AI technology to domains like invoice data capture or contract data capture.
But with the launch of ChatGPT, we've decided to really embed that technology into our platform, especially due to its flexibility.
We feel it was very powerful to embed. We have been focusing on it more and more because it's really strategic and a big revolution — it's such a disruption for us as a company as well as the software industry in general.
This is why I felt it was good for me to switch my focus. As an engineer, it’s great to make my focus on AI official and let Franck Lheureux, our new CEO who has been with the company for more than seven years now — guide Ivalua. This is a very good move for me.
What prompted your job change from CEO to Chief AI Officer? How important is it for Ivalua to have someone in the role, particularly an internal hire?
AI is such a disruptor for the company. A Chief AI Officer has to be someone who has a global understanding of the company, all its processes, to make change happen. It's not an easy role.
I'm really in the best position because I know the company, I know how it operates, I know all the leaders inside the company. It's moving fast so I felt that this is the only way to move forward with breadth and depth of applying AI technology.
This approach is now always possible and not every CEO is a technologist enough to do that, but it was the case for me.
Can you talk generally about what AI Ivalua uses and how it accelerates the operations of industry big players? Who, how and why?
In terms of technology, we are LLM-agnostic. This means that we can propose any model of Gen AI to our customer.
Beyond that, we are also making sure that our platform leverages AI in a very secure way. This is very important for our customers.
Even if some people are not moving that fast with AI, everyone will be impacted by this technology across the whole suite.
With this in mind, we decided to implement this at platform level and we are deploying that to all our customers.
What specific Gen AI use cases are you prioritising to enhance procurement decision-making, supplier collaboration and risk mitigation for global enterprises?
We’ve been going in hard on this for more than two-and-a-half years and have embedded AI at platform level and, as a result, have built many use cases.
For example, contract summarisation helps us define an improvement plan from a questionnaire we send to suppliers. Another is our category research assistant. This is very good when you need to perform a specific category of spend. You need the ability to do advanced and deep research and AI will consolidate all this information, find information on the internet to summarise and give an overview on the category for a buyer.
Soon, we’ll be releasing conversation analytics which gives the ability to ask any question about numbers or insight before providing you with that reporting in real time.
One very important module of our solution, intake management, captures any intake from a company standpoint. This is a use case where Gen AI is very powerful because it can guide the end users to express their needs and guide them through the workflow processes as required.
How is Ivalua addressing challenges like algorithmic bias in supplier evaluations and ensuring ethical AI practices while maintaining compliance across diverse regulatory landscapes?
Algorithmic bias is one of the main challenges that have to be addressed.
For that, you need to build what we call an evaluation layer, where you build a full framework where every time AI gives an answer, there is then more AI looking at that answer, evaluating it and then providing feedback to the initial AI.
This evaluation layer is really something that is being built not just within our company but in general for those who want to deploy this at scale. This is a very difficult part of the technology and a challenge that we are working on.
The idea is not to have the human out of the loop. It's very important that in this evaluation process you insert a human element that gives feedback at the right moment, providing real trust.
How do you feel your role as CAIO will help overcome challenges when it comes to AI-powered solutions for Ivalua and your clients?
I decided to take on this role not only to focus on the solution we provide to our customer, but to guide Ivalua as it goes through change.
It's very important that we ourselves ensure we understand the challenge in detail. AI seems magical in theory, but when you deploy it, you see first what's working, what's not working and then determine what you need to improve on.
There are many people who, in their job, don’t have much involvement with new technology, but they're excited when they see how it can help them do their job in a more efficient way.
I'm working within the company to deploy AI across all departments, then making sure that when we understand better that we embed it more into our solutions.
Our customers will also go through a similar experience. We know that for large companies, change takes time to happen, especially this type of change as it’s a change in the organisation, the processes and the people.
My approach in my new role is to live through the process — listen, learn and deploy that within our operations.
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