VK Orbit
Vijay Kaunds
Transformation leader & AI enthusiast
Twenty years in source-to-pay, most of it spent inside large multinational estates.
My work is the unglamorous layer underneath procurement: turning category strategy into buying channels a system can execute at 2am without asking a human. Guided buying, catalogues, marketplaces, spot buy. Deciding which route a category should take, then building the content, policy and routing that make the compliant path the quickest one. Get that wrong and you spend two years explaining why a £40 item needed three approvals.
More recently that has meant putting machine learning underneath those decisions. Classifying spend, pulling terms out of contracts, scoring what a requester is likely to need, and designing the validation a recommendation has to pass before it reaches a buyer.
What I care about is the order of operations. Most procurement AI disappoints because it went on top of content, data and process nobody had sorted out first.
What I work on
- Source-to-pay deployment and adoption at enterprise scale, across markets
- Category content, guided buying, marketplace and spot-buy channel design
- Spend classification, process mining and ML-driven prioritisation
- A background in organisational psychology, which is why I keep going on about behaviour
Writing
September 2026
The Second Signature
Every contract gets signed twice. Once by the supplier, once by whoever turns it into the objects that price the order. The second one decides what you pay, and in most organisations nobody could tell you whose name is on it.
September 2026
You touch it. You own it.
Procurement names an owner for every contract, supplier and risk. The buying channel gets none. Category managers own it and know it; what they do not own is the time to compile it.
August 2026
The only thing that fails quietly
Content is the only thing in a migration with no hard dependency, which is why it is the only thing that fails silently and late. Six options either side of cutover, argued both ways.
August 2026
Make buying simple. Then add the AI.
Procurement is being sold agents for a process it never finished designing. An argument about the order of operations, with the benchmarks behind it.
I write here occasionally. Not often, and only when I have something I would defend in a room full of vendors.
Get in touch
If you are somewhere on this and want to compare notes, I read everything that arrives and I reply properly.