In this episode of AOP Introducing, Helen Mackenzie speaks with David Doyle, Managing Director and Co-Founder at Forestreet, an AI-driven vendor and category discovery tool. David, a former partner at PwC, helped found Forestreet when he realized the need for improved market intelligence and supplier discovery. In this episode he shares Forestreet’s origin story and why this kind of category intelligence tool is such a powerful resource for procurement.
Forestreet is most helpful for procurement, particularly category managers, at the beginning of the sourcing process, when there is less familiarity with the market or supplier landscape. Powered by AI, Forestreet provides in-depth supplier intelligence in real-time and in over 70 different languages, effectively turning the category manager into a category expert in a matter of minutes, regardless of language, geography, or even previous experience with that category.
“The research cycle for category managers can be quite painful sometimes if you’re trying to develop really rich insight into a new category,” said David. “Forestreet allows you to do this in near real-time, rather than the usual weeks and weeks of effort and lots of manpower it used to take.”
The fast pace of innovation with new suppliers and emerging categories means an annual or biannual research process simply can’t keep up with what is happening in a market. Because of this, David and his co-founding team realized there was a need for a more automated, user-friendly way for procurement to understand the supply market and discover new suppliers quickly. After several years of developing and iterating on the technology, Forestreet launched its AI-driven platform in 2022, and in a moment of serendipity, the team realized that the tool they had built had the capability to search for anything. If procurement needed to find cement manufacturers 15 minutes from Shanghai or a rundown of employee onboarding technologies – the tool could do it all… and in seconds.
“We’re solving the problem about not just innovation scouting, but actually how to get really good global intelligence on a category fast enough to keep up with the business conversation and the customer, so we are very much at the front end of that discovery process,” said David.
What sets Forestreet apart, says David, is its speed, flexibility, and truly global reach. Unlike traditional research models with fixed taxonomies, Forestreet enables users to define their own categories and tailor the insights precisely to each organization’s unique needs. What’s more, Forestreet’s AI algorithms build customized databases, market maps, and supplier landscapes in around 90 minutes, rather than weeks or months.
“There are no humans at the back end of Forestreet. There is just a user, and the user drives the research and the algorithms, and then the technology drives the outcomes,” said David. “I think that really makes us stand apart and offers a big potential because we can plug into other people’s technology landscapes without the need to put a service wrapper around it.”
