“It’s more the translation of visibility. It’s not so much visibility. Visibility is there, but it’s what do you do with that?” - Mike Prorock, CEO, Tradeverifyd
Most procurement and supply chain teams aren't short on risk signals. What they're short on is the ability to determine which signals actually matter to their business and what they should do about them.
In this Provider of the Week conversation, Jim Cahalan speaks with Mike Prorock, CEO of Tradeverifyd, about using AI, internal business data, and global intelligence to make supply chain risk more actionable. From uncovering dependencies deep within supplier networks to helping teams respond to geopolitical and regulatory change, our discussion focuses on translating visibility into decisions.
What differentiates Tradeverifyd?
“There's three pools of data that really matter. There's kind of the outside, broadly, publicly known, what's happening in the world, right? That's important.
Then there's what's happening inside the organization, and that's probably as or more important for a couple of reasons, but paramount amongst that is only the company themselves knows what risk is. So you can't work on risk if you don't know what risk is.
And then the third piece is all that fun derivative data that you've got to go pull together and capture via other channels and create new data from signals in the outside world, combined with other relationships to actually be able to point out, well, what's the actual relevant data to the problem we're dealing with?
As that problem changes, can we grab new data and have it available almost instantly? That's an essential part. For us, it's the privacy, it's that data side, and providing a clean ability to bring the three kinds of data together securely.”
What kind of ROI are procurement teams seeing?
“If we think about someone sourcing at a buying desk somewhere, the number one thing that we hear consistently is instead of making 30 phone calls to figure out what was going to be impacted because we had some weird supply shock or supplier was late on something, I only had to make two or three and I knew exactly who to call and who was impacted in our work.
That alone is huge from that tactical on the ground side. We've also seen things like, ‘Hey, we went through and we tied exact risk exposure to certain legal things that could have hit us by running a foul of one country or another's regulation and we're able to root those things out clearly.’
That's not a small problem to go solve and to keep on top of and prevent from happening again.”
How is increasing geopolitical uncertainty changing customer needs?
“Geopolitical change is pushing things deeper in ways that we didn't expect to have to care about on the sourcing side.
Initially, as this was happening, we saw a lot of analysis paralysis, a lot of folks that would be making decisions saying, ‘I know I need to make something, but I don't necessarily want to shake stuff up until I know where it's going.’
Now that we're moving, it's more of ‘Okay, well this is the battleground we’ve got right now.’ It's going to be a lot of unknowns. Now I can move forward and start to put in things that help me make those unknown unknowns a little more clear.”
What’s next for Tradeverifyd?
“We've been able to start to emphasize real-time automated agentic teams going through and saying, ‘Oh, they asked me this question. Let's literally run this out in a bunch of different ways and come back with some possible solutions.’ That's an area we've been playing with a lot, and I think that's going to continue to get more valuable.
It takes such cognitive load off of chasing data around so that you can actually focus on the problem. We're trying to do much more of that enabling the user to say, here's the problem I've got. Let me get the answer quickly.
