Strategic Sourcing practitioner explaining AI.
20 yrs buying for Fortune 100 → now building AI for sourcing & contracts.
What vendors don't put in the price
"There is no AI without process intelligence."
Every failed deployment I've seen died in the layer underneath: unmapped process, unowned data, uncontrolled intake.
The market rewards the demo. The P&L rewards the plumbing.
@theroborourke Buyer side, I agree with all of it, and expect one question back: what happens if one of the 2 or 3 is out for a month? Show up with a named backup and a clean handover plan, and "small team" goes from a risk flag to a selling point.
@MediaKing From the client side, percent of spend is the first thing bigger buyers push back on. It pays the agency more when we spend more, not when results improve. A fixed fee plus a performance component makes that procurement conversation a lot easier.
@lazy_IT_guy The buyer lesson buried in here: if escalation coverage was failing, that's an SLA gap to fix at renewal, not an add-on to buy. Put coverage hours and response times in the base contract, with service credits, before the vendor learns to sell them back to you.
@BleepinComputer This is the vendor risk that never shows up in the price. Any tool with admin rights to your tenant is part of your attack surface. Quick test for any exec: can someone hand you a list of every third party holding that level of access today?
@bindureddy Cost per task is the number everyone leads with. Buyers should also price the exit: re-running evals, rewriting prompts, re-clearing security and legal review on every model swap. Cheap tokens rarely survive a switching-cost spreadsheet.
@FT From the buyer's chair, the hard part isn't the haggling. It's the mandate: walk-away price, which clauses are non-negotiable, when to hand back to a human. If you can't write that down for a junior buyer, an agent will just concede faster.
Spent 2 weeks trying to recruit UGC creators for my drain cleaner brand (Zynor USA, made in USA).
Personalized outreach to 9 creators. The offer: 20% commission per sale, free product for the demo, no quotas, no exclusivity.
Result: 0 replies. Not a single one.
Founders — what am I doing wrong? How do you actually find UGC creators who respond?
#UGC #DTC #ecommerce
@anneapplebaum Oh ! That is right ! Putin overthrew elected government in Ukraine in 2014 and then killed 14000 Russian nationals Ukrainian citizens … seriously?!? You don’t understand basic principles of cause and effect relationship? You can’t be that naive and ignorant
@ZelenskyyUa@RoyalFamily Ну-ну. Как говорил лорд Пальмерстон в 1848 году: «У Англии нет вечных союзников и нет постоянных врагов. Вечны и постоянны только её интересы». Давайте пожелаем удачи овеч��е в стае волков.