SOAR26 Recap: Navigating AI's "Messy Middle" Together

SOAR26 Recap

1. Themes floating around
2. Improvements since SOAR25
3. On the Fairmarkit innovation front: We committed to…
4. Here are some of the innovation areas we demo’d for the first time
5. My Personal Highlights

We can do all the prep in the world, but at the end of the day, the success of an event is 100% in the hands of the attendees.  And to put it cheesy, we were in good f’ing hands for SOAR26 :)

I’ll share my key highlights below, but what stuck out most to me wasn’t the product launches, it was the open debates for incredible ways to continue refining our new product areas in the coming weeks and months (some changes were made on the spot!).

I’d sit through a roundtable and hear 2-3 themes starting to gain momentum, then in the next session on a different topic ppl would tie in points from previous sessions & just keep building on the ideas free flowing.

Why this is INCREDIBLE - it showed we had a crew that genuinely cared about the topics, sharing openly, debating, and staying sharp and energetic literally from Weds morning until the 49th pizza (real #) on Thursday night.

1. Themes floating around:

• Realization that the user experience might be more in GPT or Claude then ppl thought was possible (or slack, teams, co-pilot…etc)
• Even the best of the best still struggle with change mgmt
• We’re in the “Messy Middle” with AI and Agents (credit to Brene Brown). Phase 1 is the excitement, Phase 2 can be messy, and then Phase 3 is the light at the end of the tunnel. Enterprises are complex and slow to move at scale, and AI is evolving so fast across so many places and suppliers, it’s impossible not to be in the Messy Middle as an Enterprise. And if you don’t feel like you are, you’re either lying to yourself, or not looking close enough below surface level.
• In a world where Agents knock off more and more human tasks, the role will evolve prioritizing: 1) Creativity 2) Internal stake holder mgmt & 3) Supplier mgmt
• Agents to help better support the suppliers experience and bidding are ESSENTIAL (several use cases)
• In 6 months, the job of procurement updating requestors on their request statuses will be 100 eliminated
• If we’re all (Procuretech and procurement) not laser focused on automating away the current procurement roles/functions, then we’re completely missing the mark

2. Improvements since SOAR25:

• We included significantly more customer led sessions and workshops. LFG to Randall Moore for both speaking and hosting us at BU for the 3rd straight year, Pinar SALTIK, Egor Skosyrskiy, Valeriia Basko, Jesper Mauritzen, Richard Leitao, Elizabeth Mozley, Cindy Solomon, Thomas Smolko, Somanath Mamidi, CSCP, Chris Godfrey, Joël Collin-Demers, Chris Sawchuk, Jeremy Jordan, Jonathan B. Smith, and Chris Voss - whose hair on CNN stole the show :)
• We went on a product building surge leading to SOAR to ensure all new agents, experiences and product areas were live demos vs figmas or videos.
• We encouraged ppl to highlight their challenges. Of course, it was awesome to hear customers last year talking about doing 150,000+ sourcing events and $1B+ in sourced spend, but how does that help others. Everyone is on a journey with Fairmarkit, whether eval’ing, onboarding, working through hypercare, still working through phase 1 scope, all the way to global rollout across all categories and all spend sizes. And at each stage of that journey there are hurdles and roadblocks.
• We committed this year to encouraging speakers to be very REAL. Don’t sugarcoat, because their journey and lessons learned are real insights others can take on their journey. During prep for SOAR, I was cautioned about us being to open about both the incredible successes along with customers that are facing roadblocks/obstacles - and, I could not be more thankful that we completely ignored that feedback. The collective problem solving and back and forths was authentic and so productive.

3. On the Fairmarkit innovation front: We committed to…

1. Staying laser focused on being the #1 Total Sourcing platform in the world
2. Staying passionate about always striving to deliver a true Consumer Grade experience
3. Innovating as fast as possible in this world of faster coding, faster iterations, and tech evolving so fast.

4. Here are some of the innovation areas we demo’d for the first time:

• New consumer grade design (along with KIT’s fun new animation)
• AI Prioritization (value mining): Personalized dashboard where AI is prioritization your work and taking the action for you as you give it permission
• Policy Builder Agent: Taking text, ideas, cat strategy/policy docs and having an agent help build out policies
• Strategy Agent: Once a request is directed to the right channel, this agent tells you how to optimize it (playbook you should run based on your strategies, the experience we have across millions of sourcing events, and 3rd party data. As you give it more permission, it will carrying out the actions for you as well.
• KITPilot Agent (think co-pilot with full Fairmarkit context/external data),
• KitPilot Skills (3 examples)
• 1) Doc2RFx: Drop in a complex logistics sourcing event and it’ll collab with you to create the RFx (and be your trusted partner for questions along the way).  Or drop in a less complex event and let autonomous sourcing fully drive.
• 2) Improved Scenario analysis: Not going to lie, the recent improvement by GPT and Claude have accelerated us massively here. Before the most recent models, tribal knowledge and previously built models were king, now the foundational model companies have leapfrogged the previous approaches. We tie it all together in Fairmarkit.
• 3) Personalized Exec Summary: Create personalized and interactive Exec Summary’s for the audience that you’re engaging
• Early showing of what’s coming for Projects, Pipeline, and Savings: Still work to be done here, but I firmly believe this allows customers to truly move ALL SOURCING to Fairmarkit. We demo’d dropping in Facilities and then Marketing category strategy docs and had an Agent create the draft Project and all corresponding events.
• Teased a few new agents for Suppliers, including the ability for a supplier to drop in a quote in any format. This one spurred a sweet debate on how AI should be coaching suppliers in real time (without giving them unfair insights…more to come here - but some awesome ideas now cooking :)
• Biggest hit: Demo’ing how we can use MCP to interact between various systems wherever people want to live. We showed getting a phone call for an adhoc purchasing request (sound familiar), capturing the notes live with Granola AI, and then typing in GPT to - Take the Granola notes, turn it into a Fairmarkit autonomous sourcing event, and then keep the requestor updated with all relevant updates via slack (scheduled jobs in slack). All through a simple prompt (that then turns into a skill and can monitor all the platforms ongoing for similar future requests). This is the future. The question is, what experience lives where for you and your employees. TBD for everyone = stay agile and stay flexible :)

5. My Personal Highlights:

• Sincerely super proud of our Team on all fronts. I feel very thankful to get to work with such non-stop, hard charing great humans that define our "We Before Me" core value
• AI is moving at light speed, every one of our customers feels that and knows it, and I LOVE the trust our community is putting in us to be their partner on this transformational journey (same side of the table figuring it out together).
• Final one: Earlier in my career, I thought you had to be a hard-ass/asshole who was super serious all the time to succeed. Week’s like SOAR always validate that we can show we have hair on fire urgency, take our partnership responsibilities more serious than anything, while still just having fun = Stage cue in Jules and I in the giant Eagles costumes (some ppl thought we were chickens…), and Chris and Joel in the British debate gear :)

On night #2 of SOAR - I sent this quote to the whole Fairmarkit team, and think it’s a perfect way to wrap up this recap (vibes from SOAR):

“Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life."

Dates for SOAR27 coming soon - Already fired up,

LFG