Ep 01: The Agentic Procurement Diaries: Why This Is a Once-in-a-Few-Centuries Revolution

Dear Diary… "I believe we are in the midst of a revolution — and I think in a revolution, we as a vendor also want to invest a lot in educating the community on what's really changing and how it's changing." This episode kicks off a new Art of Procurement podcast series, produced in partnership with Zycus. I sit down with the person who made the series possible to talk about why it exists and where agentic AI is really heading. Aatish Dedhia is the Founder and CEO of Zycus, a company that entered procurement in the early 2000s and has lived through every wave of its digitization since. He traces procurement's last 20 years from digitization to machine learning to generative AI, then makes a bold claim: this is a once-in-a-few-centuries change, closer to the Industrial Revolution than to mobile or cloud. In this episode of The Agentic Procurement Diaries podcast, Philip Ideson and Aatish discuss: - Why a point agent is not agentic, and why agent sprawl is causing companies to miss the real ROI of AI - The three layers of guardrails that keep agents in check: the system of record, the agentic policy layer, and the human in the loop - What procurement leaders overestimate and underestimate, starting with the truth that you cannot put AI on a broken process - The three segments Zycus sees today: AI hungry, AI curious, and AI resistant   Links: Aatish takes this conversation further at PLAN 2026 on November 18 Zycus on LinkedIn AOP Provider Directory | Zycus Subscribe to the AOP Newsletter Subscribe to Art of Procurement on YouTube