Thriving Amid Disruption Means Starting Now Summary At CPO Outlook 2025, Suzana Drakulic from Google Workspace delivered a closing session that held a mirror up to Nordic procurement’s AI adoption journey. Her message was direct: the Nordics are lagging behind in AI adoption, and the cost of status quo is higher than most organizations calculate. […]
Procurement Professionals on Easing Workload and Driving Impact
Analysis of CPO Outlook 2025 Open-Ended Survey Responses | EBG Network When asked what would most help ease their workload or make their role more impactful, procurement professionals offered candid responses that reveal both persistent frustrations and clear pathways forward. What emerges from these responses is not a list of complaints but rather a coherent […]
What Procurement Leaders Actually Want to Fix: Patterns from the Technology Wish List
When you ask what single technology challenge they’d solve, procurement leaders reveal more about transformation barriers than any survey question could When we asked 58 procurement professionals at CPO Outlook 2025 to name the single technology challenge they would solve if they could, something unexpected happened. They didn’t describe aspirational capabilities or cutting-edge innovations. Instead, […]
Reinventing Procurement, Part 3: Turning Vision into Action
How to Start Constructing Strategic Procurement Identity Based on CPO Outlook 2025 Survey | 58 procurement leaders from 47 Nordic companies Analytical Note: Anna Bjärkerud, founder of EBG | Network, has a behavioral science-focused Bachelor’s degree. She focused on how social construction can help explain resistance to organizational change. This final article in the series […]
Reinventing Procurement, Part 2: What Leaders Would Start Doing Tomorrow
The Strategic Future Procurement Leaders Are Ready to Build Based on CPO Outlook 2025 Survey | 58 procurement leaders from 47 Nordic companies Analytical Note: Anna Bjärkerud, founder of EBG | Network, has a behavioral science-focused Bachelor’s degree with emphasis on how social construction can help explain resistance to organizational change. The following analysis examines […]
Reinventing Procurement, Part 1: What Leaders Would Stop Doing Tomorrow
Breaking Free from the Operational Quicksand Based on CPO Outlook 2025 Survey | 58 procurement leaders from 47 Nordic companies EBG | Network asked procurement leaders a deceptively simple question – “If you could reinvent your role today to focus entirely on future value, what would you stop doing?” Their answers revealed something profound. This […]
What Procurement Data Showed Us at CPO Outlook 2025
Procurement at an Inflection Point: Insights from The Hackett Group at CPO Outlook 2025 At CPO Outlook 2025, Vicky Kavan from The Hackett Group delivered a keynote that captured both the speed of global change and the structural realities inside procurement teams. Her message connected Hackett’s global data with what Nordic leaders experience every day. […]
Everything is the Same, Everything is Different: AI Procurement in 2025
Lars J. Andersson from Carve Consulting delivered a keynote that challenged Nordic procurement leaders to reimagine their function from the ground up—starting with customer value and working backwards through the AI possibilities available today. The Paradox: Timeless Purpose, Revolutionary Tools When Lars J. Andersson took the CPO Outlook stage on October 16, 2025, he opened […]
SEB | From Complexity to Clarity — Building a Fact-Based Procurement Function
At CPO Outlook 2025, Michael Hansén, Chief Procurement Officer at SEB, shared a candid and inspiring story of transformation. With over two decades of procurement experience across industries, he joined SEB in 2021 to build a procurement function almost from scratch — within one of the Nordic region’s largest financial institutions. From a blank slate […]
CPO Outlook | What do procurement spend time on
This year Anna Bjärkerud co-hosted a workshop during CPO Outlook 2023. Together with René Wienmann, CO, Chr. Hansen and Patrik Andersson, Senior Advisor at Deloitte. The topic was “How can procurement improve task and outcome efficiency and effect ahead?“. Probably on most functions but not the least procurement. The idea was since the task overload […]