.png)
Executive Summary: Emerald modernized its IT procurement operations by unifying contract management, legal reviews, vendor risk workflows, and intake processes within a single AI powered platform. The team consolidated contracts, reduced legal review cycles, and accelerated procurement workflows through automated intake, connected reviews, and centralized visibility. This transformation enabled IT to shift from a bottleneck to a strategic orchestrator and created a more predictable and scalable procurement process across the organization.
The Growing Complexity of Modern IT Procurement
What happens when an IT team is responsible for hundreds of contracts, supports multiple acquired companies, and manages renewals, integrations, and vendor security workflows, without a unified system to connect it all?For Emerald, it meant fragmented processes, inconsistent data, and long review cycles. Contract details were difficult to locate. Security reviews lived in inboxes. Renewal timelines were hard to track. As vendor complexity grew, IT unintentionally became the bottleneck, slowing procurement, legal, and finance teams across the business.That changed when Emerald adopted Levelpath’s AI-native procurement platform, bringing structure, intelligence, and orchestration to IT procurement operations.
Meet Emerald: Scaling Operations Without Sacrificing Control
Emerald is a leader in live event and advertising services, with roughly 1,000 employees operating across North America and Europe. Through growth and acquisition, the company’s IT organization took on increasing responsibility for software contracts, renewals, vendor onboarding, integrations, and security coordination.At any given time, the team manages more than 239 active contracts, processes over 25 contract requests per month, and supports hundreds of procurement-related projects. Without standardized workflows or a single system of record, even simple tasks like retrieving a contract or confirming renewal terms required manual effort.As IT Operations Analyst Zach Margolis shared during the AI Masterclass, IT procurement work was spread across disconnected tools, limiting visibility and slowing execution.
The Challenge: Fragmentation, Manual Work, and Growing Risk
Before Levelpath, Emerald’s procurement workflows reflected a common reality for modern IT teams. Contract data was scattered across systems, making retrieval slow and error-prone. Legal reviews were delayed due to manual summarization and offline coordination. Vendor risk assessments lacked consistency and transparency, creating friction between IT, Security, and Procurement.Each team followed its own process, leading to inefficiencies, increased operational risk, and missed opportunities to act proactively. Instead of driving strategy, IT often found itself reacting to renewal deadlines, approval delays, and information gaps.
The Turning Point: AI-Native IT Procurement in Practice
Emerald modernized its procurement operations with Levelpath’s AI-native platform, building around a single data model, intelligent automation, and end-to-end orchestration. In addition to the features that met their procurement needs, Emerald was impressed with the service that Levelpath provides customers. Zach mentions, “We’ve met with Levelpath almost every week since we’ve had our contract in place. It’s a level of customer service we have not had with any other vendor. Levelpath is very active, and it feels like white-glove service for us.”Working with Levelpath’s implementation and customer support teams allowed Emerald to configure custom processes that match the way they work. Requests now enter through structured intake forms that automatically route work to the right stakeholders. Contracts live in a centralized repository where AI instantly surfaces key clauses, obligations, and renewal terms. Legal teams receive executive-ready summaries and deviation analysis, dramatically reducing review time. Vendor risk tasks and assessments are tracked directly within the supplier record, giving IT and Security shared, real-time visibility.
The Impact: Measurable Results Across IT Procurement
The outcome of this adoption of Levelpath’s AI-native, unified platform is quantifiable results that help prove out return on investment (ROI). Emerald was able to upload all of their previously fragmented contracts, connect teams for easy collaboration, and integrate Levelpath with their existing systems. “After discussing with Levelpath, we were able to get [the Ironclad] integration in place, and it saved us a lot of time. Previously, our requests were taking around 29 to 30 days, and now we’ve shortened that to about four to five,” says Zach. With Levelpath’s AI embedded throughout the procurement lifecycle, Emerald saw immediate, quantifiable improvements:
- 84% reduction in Legal review cycles: cut down from 1 month to 4.82 days through AI-driven contract summaries and a pre-built Ironclad integration.
- 600+ procurement cycles streamlined: through a reduction in manual coordination across IT, Legal, Finance, and Procurement teams.
- $18M in visible spend centralized: improved executive reporting and renewal planning with transparent insights.
- 239 active contracts managed: previously fragmented contracts were consolidated into a single, searchable repository with OCR technology.
- 25+ monthly contract requests processed: completed faster through automated intake and approval workflows.
The result is a procurement operation that is faster, more predictable, and significantly easier to manage at scale.
Why Modern IT Procurement Matters
Emerald’s experience reflects a broader shift underway. As software ecosystems grow more complex and security requirements increase, IT is uniquely positioned to lead procurement transformation, if they are supported by the right technology.AI-native procurement does not replace expertise. It enhances it by providing trusted data, intelligent automation, and connected workflows. Contracts become actionable. Renewals become predictable. Risk becomes proactive. And IT evolves from bottleneck to strategic orchestrator.
Your Next Step
AI-native procurement is no longer just aspirational; it is delivering results today. Many organizations begin by modernizing a single workflow, such as contract review or renewal management, and expand from there.To learn how IT Procurement can transform operations through AI-native workflows, request a demo or watch the AI Masterclass on demand.– Gemma
