Notes from the Floor: Procurement Summit 2026

The Matchory Team is back from Hamburg, and two days later, we're still thinking about the conversations we had at Procurement Summit 2026.

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Procurement right now feels like it's standing at a real turning point. Teams have more data than ever, AI agents are producing more output than ever, and yet decisions don't seem to be getting any faster or any easier to make. Walking the floor in Hamburg, talking to category managers, procurement leads and people who've been in this industry for decades, that tension came up again and again: everyone is sitting on more information, yet almost no one feels like they have a clear picture of their own supplier base.

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That's exactly the conversation we came to have, and it's why Booth B02 stayed busy for two days straight. We made it easy to stop by, too. The team showed up in matching Matchory football shirts, which turned out to be a great way to break the ice before getting into the real talk.

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Over the two days, several conversations eventually circled back to the same frustration, even when people described it in completely different words. A category manager mentioned not finding out a key supplier was struggling until a delivery was already late. International teams with suppliers in the 5x digits with cero visibility into where is what and who is where. Someone else simply said they didn't fully trust their own supplier data, and just left it at that. None of them framed it as a single, shared problem. But by the end of day one, we couldn't unsee it: it was the same structural gap, showing up everywhere.

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That gap is exactly what we've spent the last year building Matchory around. ERPs are very good at recording what a supplier has delivered. They were never built to tell you what a supplier can actually do, whether two records in two different systems are the same company, or which of your suppliers are quietly exposed to the same risk. That information either doesn't exist anywhere, or it's scattered across spreadsheets, emails, and the heads of a few people who've been around long enough to remember.

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We call what's missing the supplier data layer: the resolved, enriched, single source of truth per supplier that sits underneath everything else, whether that's a category manager doing sourcing research, a risk team checking exposure, or an AI agent trying to answer a question about your supply base. Without it, every tool on top, ERP, AI copilot, or otherwise, is only ever as good as the messy data feeding it.

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That idea, owning supplier data isn't the advantage, connecting and resolving it into something usable is, ran through nearly every conversation we had at the booth. It was also at the heart of the Master Class our CEO & Co-Founder, Aiko Wiegand, gave on day two.

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Aiko's session, "Daten haben Sie. Und jetzt?", dived into the truth: most teams already have their historical portfolio data sitting somewhere. What's actually missing isn't a link to the external market, it's internal alignment. Category teams working in silos create cross-functional half-truths and leave potential on the table, and with AI agents now producing more output than ever, human communication becomes the real bottleneck, not a lack of data or a lack of AI. He walked the room through four stages for fixing that: Have, See, Understand, Act, showing how to merge internal history with live market data to actually spot and unlock potential instead of just sitting on it.

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Procurement is clearly in the middle of a real shift right now, not a slow one. AI agents are moving from pilot projects into actual daily use, sustainability and compliance requirements keep adding new layers of complexity, and teams are under more pressure than ever to move fast without losing control. Walking the exhibition hall in Hamburg made that shift tangible. Other exhibitors like our partners akirolabs, Mercanis and costdata are all building serious tools for different parts of that same future, strategic category management, AI-native sourcing, procurement analytics, each going after a real piece of how procurement gets done. Seeing that density of focused, capable companies in one hall was a good reminder that this industry is being rebuilt from several directions at once, not just one.

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A genuine thank you to the organizers of Procurement Summit for putting together such a well-run and energetic event. Bringing this many people together for two days of real exchange takes real effort, and it showed.

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To everyone who stopped by, played a round of table football, or just told us what's actually broken in their supplier data: thank you. We'll see you next year!

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