EBG | Network welcomes Ivalua back to CPO Outlook 2026, 14–15 October in Stockholm — an Expert organisation we have worked alongside since 2017. Here is why a company that spent a decade building the foundation, not the feature, is worth a conversation in the year everyone discovered agents.
The thesis, before the praise. In 2026 every procurement vendor has an agent to sell you. The more useful question is the one Ivalua has been answering since long before it was fashionable: what is the agent standing on? An autonomous agent is only ever as trustworthy as the data model and the governance beneath it — and that is an architecture decision you cannot bolt on after the fact.
Where Ivalua actually stands in 2026
Three things from the past few months tell the story better than any pitch.
- In early 2026 Ivalua was again named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Source-to-Pay Suites — recognised specifically for a unified platform built on a single codebase, single data model and single user experience (independent coverage here).
- That architecture is the whole point. Ivalua’s argument — and increasingly the market’s — is that agentic AI needs data it can actually reach and govern across the full source-to-pay lifecycle, rather than AI retrofitted onto systems never designed for it.
- In June 2026 it put that thesis into product, launching IVA Studio: its Intelligent Virtual Agent reframed as a fully agentic system that can execute source-to-pay work — with governance enforced at the platform level. The agent inherits the same permissions as the people it works for, cannot exceed them, and logs every action for full auditability.
So what — for you, on a Monday morning
Here is where it stops being a vendor story and becomes yours. If you are going to let an agent code an invoice, shortlist a supplier, or redline a contract, the question your auditor, your CFO and your own team will ask is not “is it clever?” It is: what did it see, what was it allowed to do, and can you show the trail? That moves the AI conversation off the demo screen and onto the two things procurement has wrestled with for years — the quality of your data and the clarity of your governance.
This is not abstract for this room. Across CPO Outlook 2025 and the EBG | Xperience workshops, the most stubborn barrier leaders named was not strategy or talent — it was data quality, sitting underneath every other transformation struggle. Agents do not remove that barrier. They raise the stakes on it. Ivalua’s bet is that data and governance are really one problem — and that solving it is what makes an agent safe to trust. Whether you agree is exactly what these two days are for.
That tension is what CPO Outlook 2026 is built around: how procurement looks today, with its many competing jobs at once, and how it may look as agents take on more of them — and how you, as a leader inside a team, hold both realities together without dropping either.
A partnership that predates the hype
Ivalua is not a new face in this room. The relationship runs back to the Source 2 Pay Summit in 2017, through keynotes its support made possible — Ahlsell’s CPO at CPO Outlook 2022 among them — to Platinum partnership at CPO Outlook 2023, CFO Outlook 2024, and a run of EBG webinars from Rolls-Royce’s transformation journey to Elkem’s supplier-management work with PwC. Most recently, Henrik Nyberg led the “Supplier Data Mastery” roundtable and joined SSAB on stage at CPO Outlook 2025, and Ivalua helped open the risk-focused EBG | Xperience day in Gothenburg that same spring. Nearly a decade of showing up to the conversation, not just the exhibition hall — which is the only kind of partner this summit is built for.
About Ivalua in brief
Ivalua is a leading provider of cloud-based Spend Management software. Their complete, unified platform empowers businesses to effectively manage all categories of spend and all suppliers, increasing profitability, improving ESG performance, lowering risk and improving employee productivity. Learn more at ivalua.com.
A note to future sponsors
If you are an expert organisation weighing what sponsoring CPO Outlook actually buys you, this article is the answer. We do not hand you a slot and a step-and-repeat. We give your perspective a place in the conversation — in writing before the summit, and across a table during it — because relevance travels further than reach.
Meet Ivalua at CPO Outlook 2026
Ivalua joins us as an Expert organisation on 14–15 October in Stockholm. Come ready to agree or disagree with them — productively. That is how these two days work.
→ Register and see the full programme at cpooutlook.com