The a16z Show · Friday, October 2, 2026
Vlad Kyle highlights that procurement involves more than just negotiating prices; it's an intense process involving multiple stakeholders across legal, cost engineering, finance, and procurement. He explains that while ERP systems show a final price, they don't capture the extensive work, emails, and analysis that happen behind the scenes, which is where AI agents can add significant value.
“And essentially, like when we... Thank you.”
“And essentially, like when we... Thank you. I think the reason is how we convince them is what I already said earlier on. So we... were like always a little bit ahead of the curve. Okay, so we knew the technology is coming. So we like even before CHPT came out, um, like we just started a few weeks before like this chatwt breakthrough. So we already heard all of the problems, then we hear the hype in the, let's say like tech bubble, and we were able to pitch this enterprises and we quickly figured out, okay, like this is a, this could be like an interesting use case, like just chatbot applications or retrieval agents, document processing.”
“And then we we are able to find out the problem and then ship this quickly to them. And then, Obviously, this is the people factor of trusting. So we are telling them something about it and we're able to really ship something in production. But then there's also this product perspective where we have a lot of evals in place. So we...”