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 with a paradox that resonates with findings from EBG’s Nordic procurement research: procurement’s fundamental mission remains unchanged, yet the tools to achieve it are transforming at unprecedented speed.
The timeless mission centers on five pillars that procurement leaders know intimately: cost savings, sustainability, speed, risk management, and quality. As Lars emphasized, procurement sits at the intersection of business demand, supplier capability, and financial accountability. These fundamentals haven’t shifted in decades.
Yet our CPO Outlook 2025 survey of 58 procurement professionals from 47 companies reveals a sobering reality about execution: 78% of organizations remain stuck at “developing” digital maturity, 17% being “Advanced” and 0% considering themselves “leading” in digital or AI adoption. The barriers Lars identified—fragmented ownership, inconsistent master data, limited integration, transactional supplier relations, and weak risk frameworks—mirror precisely what survey respondents described in open-ended responses.
The Platform Paradigm Shift: Monolithic Suites Are Dead
Drawing from nearly two decades at Maersk, including leading a 100-person tech team building procurement solutions, Lars delivered a stark message about the enterprise software landscape: the era of comprehensive end-to-end procurement suites is over. Organizations invested heavily in promises of seamless digital transformation and unified platforms. The reality, in his view, fell dramatically short.
The future Lars envisions is flexible and tailored. Specialized best-of-breed solutions are proliferating, low-code platforms reduce barriers to entry, systems can finally talk to each other through modern integration layers, and the broken promise of monolithic suites no longer holds organizations captive to poor user experiences.
From Theory to Impact: Multi-Agent Systems in 2025
The heart of Lars’s presentation focused on what makes 2025 fundamentally different from previous AI hype cycles: multi-agent systems (MAS) that can deliver measurable impact today, despite reliability remaining inconsistent.
Lars presented a detailed comparison of human capabilities versus MAS-agent capabilities across nine procurement tasks. The results are striking:
Where MAS-agents excel: Reading unstructured documents like PDFs, cross-referencing data across systems, data monitoring for rate changes, creating structured outputs like POs and reports, and scalability—running 24/7 across hundreds of suppliers or categories.
Where humans remain essential: Stakeholder alignment and negotiation, requiring contextual, political, and emotional intelligence that AI fundamentally lacks.
Where collaboration matters most: Decision recommendation, volume forecasting, and learning from outcome feedback—tasks where MAS can process vastly more data but lacks real-world intuition and political awareness unless guided by human judgment.
This nuanced view counters both AI skepticism and AI utopianism. As Lars put it, “Humans win one event”—but that one event (stakeholder alignment) happens to be critical for procurement’s strategic value.
Real-World Applications: Three Multi-Agent Systems
Lars showcased three specific MAS implementations that Carve Consulting has developed:
1. Dispute Management MAS: Uses specialized agents to sort disputes, prioritize them, collect data, win probability scoring, and route cases. The business impact? Higher dispute win rates, reduced backlog, improved supplier trust, and freed capacity for finance teams to focus on strategy rather than fixing issues.
2. PO Creation MAS: Automates purchase order creation through coordinated agents handling master data validation, material estimation, data extraction, ERP integration, logic enforcement, and system integration. Result: 80% reduction in manual PR/PO work and fewer errors from contract logic applied automatically.
3. Compliance Multi-Agent System: A team of AI agents that proactively monitors and manages compliance readiness, including regulation tracking, control auditing, risk scanning, gap identification, report observation, and escalation routing. Impact: proactive compliance rather than failed audits, confident board conversations, and full reports with foresight rather than fire-drills.
These aren’t theoretical. As Lars noted, “This isn’t a vision board. These agents are already being used.” Early adopters are seeing measurable benefits in their operations.
Designing Procurement from Scratch: The Future-State Vision
If you could design a procurement function today with AI, customer value, and agility at its core, what would it look like? Lars presented a compelling three-tier model:
Human-Led Tasks: Strategic relationship building, complex negotiations, policy shaping, and leading innovation initiatives that require judgment and creativity. This is where procurement builds supplier relationships, defines sourcing strategies, manages escalations and ambiguity, leads category innovation, and shapes governance standards.
AI-Augmented Tasks: GenAI assists with drafting supplier communications, generating tender documents, investigating mismatches and errors, forecasting demand patterns, and simulating negotiation scenarios. Humans remain in control but work with vastly enhanced capabilities.
Fully Automated Tasks: Bots and APIs handle validation and routing of PRs, converting PRs to POs, performing invoice matching, monitoring supplier risk factors, and releasing matched payments—all without human intervention.
This vision aligns remarkably well with what Nordic procurement leaders told us they aspire to. In the CPO Outlook survey, when asked about future capabilities needed, respondents emphasized strategic supplier collaboration (72%), data-driven insights (68%), and risk intelligence (58%)—all firmly in the “human-led” category. Yet they acknowledged current reality: limited time for strategic work due to transactional burdens that AI-augmented and automated tasks could eliminate.
Start with Customer Value and Work Backwards
Perhaps Lars’s most important message was methodological: don’t start with AI capabilities and look for problems to solve. Start with customer value—the end customer, not internal stakeholders—and work backwards.
Want to drive cost savings? Deploy a Sourcing Optimizer Agent, Contract Compliance Agent, P2P Execution Agent, or Demand Forecast Agent.
Focused on sustainability? Build a Carbon Impact Estimator Agent or Sustainable Supplier Screening system.
Need speed? Implement an RFP agent, Spot Purchasing Agent, or P2P Execution MAS.
Prioritizing quality? Create a Supplier Performance Agent, Service Confirmation Agent, or Deviation Alert Agent.
Managing risk? Deploy a Supplier Risk Monitoring Agent, DORA Agent, or Dispute Agent.
Each value stream has specific agent opportunities. The key is starting with strategic clarity about what matters most to your customers and business.
This customer-centric philosophy echoes throughout our EBG research. When procurement professionals described their biggest challenges in survey responses, a recurring theme emerged: procurement must bridge gaps between Sales, R&D, Finance, and other functions while ensuring regulatory adherence, supplier reliability, and customer trust. The value procurement creates flows ultimately to customers – internal and external
Five Leadership Imperatives for AI Transformation
Theory without action changes nothing. Lars concluded with five leadership imperatives for organizations beginning AI-enabled transformation:
1. Start with purpose and people, anchored in customer value: Don’t deploy AI for AI’s sake. Begin with the value streams that matter most to customers and work backwards to identify where AI can amplify impact.
2. Build belief through experience: Don’t convince teams with PowerPoint presentations. Let them experience success through small, visible wins. As Lars noted, “Your team is used to this…just not at work”—people already use AI assistants in their personal lives.
3. Redesign for a hybrid workforce: The future procurement team includes humans, AI-augmented professionals, and fully automated systems working hand-in-hand. Organizational design must evolve accordingly.
4. Create a culture of curiosity: Encourage experimentation and reward learning. Treat iteration as progress, not failure. Build a learning culture because there’s much we don’t yet know about the AI-enabled future.
5. Scale with discipline: Keep what works, retire what doesn’t—be aggressive but gradual. Establish governance to prevent agents from mushrooming chaotically, but don’t let governance become a barrier to progress.
During the Q&A, Lars was asked where organizations should start. His answer was direct: “I wouldn’t start in a corner that is safe. I would start where it matters the most.” Pick something important enough that success creates meaningful internal momentum, but not so critical that failure would be catastrophic.
Three Non-Negotiable Success Factors
Lars concluded with three dimensions that transform AI implementation from temporary project to permanent capability:
Strategic Clarity: Clear priorities and vision aligned with customer value. Without knowing what matters most, AI becomes a solution searching for problems.
Execution Discipline: Consistent delivery with measurable rigor. Quick wins must scale into sustained operational excellence, balancing change velocity with performance pressure.
Adaptive Culture: Learning mindset and rapid adjustment. As Lars noted during Q&A, “There’s so many things we don’t know about the future”—organizations must be comfortable with experimentation, learning from failures, and iterating rapidly.
These three dimensions create transformation as a permanent organizational capability, not a one-time program. As Lars put it: “Everything is the same—until someone decides to lead differently.”
Why This Matters Now for Nordic Procurement
The urgency in Lars’s message connects directly to patterns we observed across 144 Nordic procurement professionals from 128 companies surveyed through CPO Outlook 2025 (58 responses from 47 companies) and EBG Xperience events (86 responses from 81 companies with a few overlaps at CPO Outlook):
Organizations are skilled but stuck: Teams have capabilities but lack empowerment and tools to execute strategically. The “messy middle” between ambition and execution defines Nordic procurement today.
Structure lags transformation momentum: While 65% of organizations have centralized or hybrid procurement models, fragmented ownership and siloed systems prevent coordinated progress.
Digital investment hasn’t delivered maturity: Despite years of system deployments, 74% remain in “developing” digital maturity. The problem isn’t investment—it’s integration, data quality, and adoption.
Cross-functional friction persists: Procurement must navigate misaligned expectations from Sales, R&D, Finance, and other functions. As one survey respondent noted, procurement is “having to bridge all gaps between Sales, R&D, Finance etc while ensuring regulatory adherence, supplier reliability, and customer trust.”
Early adopters are pulling ahead: While most organizations explore AI cautiously, early adopters are already seeing measurable benefits. The competitive gap will widen quickly.
Lars’s keynote was a practical roadmap for organizations ready to break free from the “developing” plateau and join the leading edge of procurement transformation.
The EBG Network Invitation: Continue the Conversation in 2026
The conversation Lars started in the spring during EBG | Xperience CPH and at CPO Outlook 2025 continues throughout 2026 with EBG Network. Our spring EBG Xperience Focus Days bring together 25-30 senior procurement leaders for intimate, practitioner-led workshops addressing the exact challenges Lars outlined:
Helsinki – March 25, 2026
Stockholm – April 23, 2026
Malmö – April 28, 2026
Each workshop combines peer learning with honest practitioner reflections—not polished success stories, but real challenges and ongoing experiments. EBG create space for the kind of authentic conversation Lars modeled: acknowledging that “everything is the same” (our mission, our challenges) while exploring how “everything is different” (the tools, the possibilities, the pace of change).
CPO Outlook 2026 returns in October, bringing the Nordic procurement community together again for two days of strategic insight, peer connection, and forward-looking conversation.
The technology is here. The agents are ready. The question is: will you be among those who decide to lead differently?
About Lars J. Andersson: Lars is a Partner at Carve Consulting with nearly two decades of procurement and digital transformation experience at Maersk, where he led strategic sourcing, established a 100-person product platform, and directed an $42 billion P2P transformation across eight categories. He joined Carve Consulting in January 2025 and specializes in AI-enabled procurement transformation.
About EBG Network: EBG Network organizes webinars, writes articles, CPO Outlook, the Nordic region’s premier procurement conference running for 15 years, and EBG Xperience Focus Days—intimate workshops across Nordic cities focused on peer-to-peer learning for senior procurement professionals.