Watch Chris Sawchuk unpack why tail spend remains procurement’s biggest hidden drain — and how leading organizations are using AI and autonomous negotiation to finally control it.
Tail spend has always been one of procurement’s most elusive challenges. Spread across thousands of transactions and hundreds of suppliers, it often escapes visibility, drains team capacity, and introduces unmanaged risk. In this exclusive PLaN session, Chris Sawchuk, Principal and Global Procurement Advisory Practice Leader at The Hackett Group, presents a data-driven breakdown of why tail spend continues to resist traditional approaches — and what leaders must do differently going forward.
In this 20-minute on-demand briefing, Sawchuk shares Hackett’s latest benchmarks and explains why organizations lose millions each year not because of large, strategic categories, but because of the fragmented long tail. He outlines the structural reasons teams struggle to manage it, the risk implications of an uncontrolled supplier base, and the operational inefficiencies that compound as procurement workloads grow.
Most importantly, Sawchuk explains why agentic AI and autonomous negotiation have emerged as the most pragmatic and scalable answers. By applying intelligence to every small transaction, enterprises can reduce cycle times, improve compliance, capture missed savings, and create consistency across categories and regions.
Whether you lead a global procurement function or are building your digital transformation roadmap, this session delivers the clarity and direction needed to tackle one of procurement’s most entrenched challenges.
