Joint bold vision: The next era of AI-driven procurement

Who’s rising to the challenge?

Across the procurement and supply chain landscape, innovators are answering the call. Startups are reimagining how organizations buy. Enterprise leaders are driving measurable transformation through AI and automation. And industry voices are reshaping the conversation about what procurement can and should be.

To recognize these trailblazers, Deloitte is proud to collaborate with DPW on the 2026 DPW Awards, an annual competition celebrating some of the most innovative technology companies and leaders in procurement and supply chain. Winners will take center stage at DPW Amsterdam (September 29–October 1, 2026) in front of thousands of enterprise leaders, investors, and innovators from around the world.

This year's program features four categories, including two exciting new additions:

• Early Stage: For startups with $0–$2M in annual recurring revenue (ARR)
• Growth Stage: For startups with $2M–$10M in ARR
• NEW: Digital Innovation Award: For buy side organizations driving measurable digital transformation
• NEW: Influencer of the Year: For individuals shaping the industry through thought leadership and community engagement 

Deloitte’s Michiel Junge greeting a DPW Award recipient on the main stage of DPW Amsterdam 2025. Photo: DPW / TON Media.

A rapidly agentifying procurement ecosystem

The expanding DPW Awards field reflects a broader procurement ecosystem that is advancing faster than at any point in the history of the profession. Procurement has become one of the hottest spaces for agentic AI, with a remarkable volume of startups and established players advancing simultaneously, pushing the boundaries of front end and back end buying experience, speed, and efficiency. The procurement technology ecosystem has never been more vibrant, which is unambiguously good for CPOs.

What stood out most at DPW New York was not any single product or announcement. It was the clarity of conviction among the leaders in the room: The next competitive advantage in procurement will not come from adopting AI tools. It will come from fundamentally redesigning operating models, governance, and decision making around AI. The organizations pulling ahead are not waiting to see how the technology matures. They are building now.

Deloitte’s Ji Park co-presenting the DPW Amsterdam 2026 Awards announcement on the main stage at DPW New York, June 4, 2026. Photo: DPW / TON Media.

The connective tissue CPOs have been missing

It was in this context that Deloitte chose DPW New York to launch Zora AI™ for Sourcing and Procurement, part of Deloitte's digital worker platform for enterprise operations.

Zora AI acts as an end-to-end orchestration layer across Source to Pay (S2P). It connects natively across the systems and data repositories enterprises rely on, such as ERP, CRM, communication platforms, and supplier portals, pulling contextual signals dynamically to power decisions at every stage of the S2P cycle.

That cross-system intelligence addresses fragmentation, one of procurement's most persistent structural problems. Zora AI spans the full S2P journey, from intake and demand shaping through sourcing, contract execution, purchase order management, and spend analytics, treating it as a single continuous workflow rather than a series of disconnected steps. Reducing those handoffs is where the real value is unlocked.

What makes Zora AI distinct is not only that it is built on industry leading AI infrastructure, but that Deloitte's procurement intelligence is built in: the pattern recognition, category benchmarks, and process expertise accumulated across decades of advising some of the world's largest procurement organizations. It is what CPOs need to translate AI capability into business outcomes.