Welcome to our new newsletter. As a start-up, we’re always evolving and trying new things with the goal of continuous improvement. That is true for our newsletter, too: We want to keep it fresh, so starting this month, you’ll hear from different voices in the Circular ecosystem, from our team to our customers, partners, advisors and board members. They’ll share quick takes on developments and research in AI, procurement and supply chain best practices, raw materials industry, market data, legislation, circularity and more.
I’m excited to kick off the first edition, highlighting AI adoption trends and what they mean for our industry.
Ian Arthurs
CEO, Circular
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Circular has always been focused on developing and applying data to enable better, faster sourcing decisions and transactions. Our continuing innovation in AI is paying off with rapidly expanding and super-rich market data across multiple categories of sustainable and raw materials. That data is the engine of incredibly powerful agentic sourcing tools, from portfolio management to spec matching to quotes to transactions. The pace of innovation is increasing, too, especially as the AI industry continues to evolve rapidly. With all the hype about AI, I am also hearing some confusion and questions. Where should procurement leaders focus their efforts, and what matters in finding successful applications of AI? See below for some starting thoughts: three procurement AI adoption insights that stood out to me recently.
The development and adoption of enterprise AI will be faster than anything we’ve ever seen before
See Mary Meeker's excellent AI Trends report for incredibly valuable industry analysis. The general takeaway is AI will be a bigger change to enterprises than the internet was, with a much faster adoption cycle. If you hadn’t figured it out already, this spells it out: every line of a P&L will be revolutionized over the next three years. LLM performance — and the huge investments to make them better, cheaper and less energy intensive — will continue to drive adoption. The next wave of enterprise AI applications will go from generic user assistants to complex agentic tools addressing sophisticated tasks like those throughout the procurement process.
✅ Our take: 100% agree. At Circular, we’ve been at the forefront of the transition from generic models to highly specific category data and agentic sourcing applications. The very near future will see a proliferation of category-specific data and agentic use cases, driving a significant improvement in enterprise procurement productivity.
64% of procurement leaders expect AI to transform their roles within five years.
The Hackett Group found that AI tools are closing the efficiency gap with productivity gains and cost improvements of up to 10%.
✅ Our take: From our experience, these numbers seem conservative. I believe impact will increase significantly with the coming model improvements and adoption, per the data in the report above.
70% of Chief Procurement Officers reported bad data quality as a significant barrier to AI adoption.
Gartner noted that although 68% of these leaders are prioritizing their investment in AI, bad data quality may be preventing them from experiencing ROI.
✅ Our take: Not surprising. We’ve seen this with some customers ourselves — a general concern about all AI because one application of it (typically in customer service) under-delivered in initial implementation. We develop our products with the principle that great enterprise AI applications require highly specific foundational data. Success in agentic sourcing, in particular, comes from unlocking the value that has been historically found in relationships, analog systems and fragmented data in the markets the teams are sourcing from. That’s what makes it hard. You can’t just scrape the internet to find answers — you need deep technical and transactional data to succeed. Again, this is where Circular’s sourcing model stands out, and is the reason why we’re seeing such great results, like with our customer Walmart, who experienced 20% cost savings in only three weeks through our agentic platform.
We want to hear your thoughts, too. Take our three-part poll on LinkedIn, where we ask professionals in procurement, sourcing and supply chain about their challenges, hopes and fears when it comes to sourcing and emerging technology.
About Circular
Circular.co is an AI sourcing platform for sustainable and next-gen materials. Circular’s AI-powered platform runs on the world’s largest recycled materials model, allowing buyers to instantly access new suppliers, analyze pricing, get custom quotes, transact, and manage quality, saving time and cost. Global brands use Circular.co to make data-driven decisions and efficiently find the right material from the right suppliers at the right price. Book a demo here or visit circular.co.