Levelpath spent this week in Chicago and New York, and we are still thinking about the conversations. Thank you to the SIG and DPW teams for having us, and a huge thank you to the customers who joined us on stage to share their stories. These events work best when real practitioners are willing to talk about what they are building.
Many of our conversations with attendees started the same way: someone’s CEO is asking for an AI plan. The question was not whether to adopt AI in procurement. The question now is where to start, how to measure it, and what "good" looks like in practice.
Your Procurement Team Needs an AI Plan
At both events, our Levelpath speakers talked through how organizations should be thinking about building out their AI playbook for procurement. The steps we find matter most: investing in new skills and hands-on training, creating an Agent Ops role to own your AI workflows, and tracking new metrics like adoption rate, number of workflows automated, and number of agents deployed. If you want a deeper look at that framework, we wrote about it in detail here.
Here are stories from two customers who have already taken the first steps.
Bob Campbell, GATX, speaks about their experience with Levelpath at SIG Chicago.
GATX Took the Stage in Chicago
Bob Campbell, Director of Sourcing and Procurement at GATX, joined Levelpath's Head of Finance Sarah Toomey on stage in Chicago to walk through how a lean procurement team can expand its reach with AI.
GATX’s focus from the start was choosing high-value workflows, proving results quickly, and scaling from there. Bob’s team deployed Levelpath in less than a week and used the Contract Discovery Agent to identify $3.5 million in savings that manual review would have taken far longer to surface. Seven of their shops adopted the new procurement process within the first months, hitting a 90% adoption rate that exceeded their previous tools.
Bob walked SIG attendees through how AI is changing sourcing at GATX. Their team uses Levelpath’s AI-powered bid analysis to compare 10 to 15 vendor responses side by side in 15 seconds, regardless of whether suppliers submit in Excel, Word, or PDF. Supplier enrichment automatically identifies preferred and competing vendors, and for niche categories where buyers can only partially describe what they need, AI finds qualified suppliers without waiting on corporate.
Bob's advice on change management was to partner with Learning and Development on recorded training sessions, pilot high-value workflows first, and standardize templates for sourcing events. This approach worked for them because it met people where they were and showed them the value before asking them to change.
Levelpath Customer speaks with Stan Garber at DPW New York.
A Packed House at DPW New York
The DPW session in New York drew a packed house. Stan Garber, Levelpath's President and Co-Founder, was joined on stage by the Source to Pay Director of a 100-year-old company operating in a complex, highly regulated industry.
The story was compelling: a procurement function that transformed from decentralized operations into a unified strategic business partner. Their multi-year roadmap started with foundation building, then investing in tools and technology, and quickly becoming a strategic business partner.
The team took a phased approach to Levelpath, launching with Front Door (a centralized AI intake for requests) and Sourcing (a flexible, AI-powered process for running competitive bids). In the first three months, the team ran 40+ sourcing events, onboarded 25 procurement users, and invited 270 suppliers into the platform. Half of all their sourcing events were published in a single day.
The Source to Pay Director framed AI adoption as this: AI moves low-value administrative work off people's plates so they can focus on strategy, negotiations, and cost savings. The goal is freeing up procurement for the work that drives real value, not reducing headcount.
The session room at DPW New York while Stan Garber speaks on stage with a Levelpath customer.
What Stuck With Us
The through line at both events was the same question we keep hearing from procurement leaders: what can AI actually do for my team right now?
The honest answer is more than most people expect. Both customers started with one or two workflows and quickly expanded because the results showed up fast. That pattern is consistent across our customer base. Levelpath's AI Agents handle work across the full procurement lifecycle, from sourcing and contracts to supplier management and intake, and teams can build their own custom agents on top of what we provide. The unlock is having a platform where AI has the full context of your procurement data, so the output is more specific and useful.
If you want to see what Levelpath’s AI Agents look like in action, book a demo or come to one of our upcoming events.
