Raindrop at ProcureCon West:
What We Took Away

Las Vegas played host to North America’s premier gathering of Procurement leaders last week, and the Raindrop team was right in the middle of it. Three days, hundreds of conversations, one panel session, and more than a few genuine moments of “huh, everyone’s dealing with this.” ProcureCon West 2026 did not disappoint. Here’s what stood out.

The Supplier Management Panel: Honest Conversations from the Stage

Raindrop’s COO & Co-Founder Ward Karson moderated one of the conference’s sessions: “Oh, That’s How You Do It? Elevating Your Supplier Management Practices to the Next Level” alongside Lawrence Kane, Senior Director of Procurement for Transamerica, Shone Richardson, VP of Procurement for RPM Living, and Anson Best, Director of Global Procurement for United Airlines.

The panel brought together Procurement leaders from across industries to talk about what best-in-class supplier management actually looks like, not in theory, but in practice. The conversation got real fast.

A few things that resonated most with the room:

We are all suppliers to someone. That reframe shifted the entire energy of the discussion and got people thinking about supplier relationships from both sides of the table.
Who owns the supplier relationship business or procurement? There’s no universal answer, but the organizations that have defined it clearly are the ones operating with the least friction.
Supplier relationships aren’t just operational. They’re strategic. How you build them, maintain them, and repair them when things go sideways matters more than most teams realize.

New CPOs, Seasoned Veterans, and the Conversations in Between

What struck us this year: the questions being asked by new CPOs and the observations being shared by experienced practitioners were remarkably aligned. The language was different, but the underlying challenges, visibility, talent, technology adoption, and stakeholder trust were the same.

That’s actually a sign of a maturing function. Procurement has a shared vocabulary now, and a shared sense of where the work needs to go.

We were grateful to connect with so many of you at the booth, over dinner, and in the hallways between sessions. Those conversations are the real reason we show up.

3 Things We Heard Over and Over Again

1. AI is essential, but most teams are still fighting spreadsheets.

Every session touched on AI in some form. The appetite is real, and the possibilities are exciting. Here’s the truth that kept surfacing: a significant number of procurement teams are still managing core workflows in spreadsheets. Before AI can deliver on its promise, the foundation has to be there. Data has to be clean. Processes have to be structured. You can’t automate chaos.

2. Intake is having a moment, for the right reasons.

There was a lot of talk about intake management at, and it wasn’t just vendor hype. Procurement leaders are realizing that intake the way requests enter the system is where a lot of downstream problems originate. Broken intake means broken visibility, broken approvals, and broken spend data. Fixing intake isn’t a technology project. It’s a process project that technology can then accelerate.

3. The best procurement teams are investing in relationships, not just systems.

Session after session, the theme of relationships kept coming up: supplier relationships, stakeholder relationships, cross-functional partnerships. The Procurement leaders who are winning aren’t just the ones with the best tech stack. They’re the ones who have built trust across the business and with their supplier base. Technology enables that. It doesn’t replace it.