A $2B portfolio spread across more than 1,900 suppliers, consolidated by nearly a third in about twelve months, with AI governance built into sourcing rather than set beside it.
A global insurance carrier was spending roughly $2B a year on professional services, and the supplier base had grown past 1,900 firms: consultancies, law firms, staffing suppliers, technology integrators and specialist advisors. Most of that spend was legitimate and most of it was buying something real. It just was not buying it once.
Requests came into sourcing without a common front door, so cycle time depended on who picked up the request. Contract terms lived in documents that could not be queried at a portfolio level. And AI had already arrived inside the supplier base, mostly through product updates and delivery methods rather than through anything the carrier had approved. In our experience this is common. The AI questions tend to arrive before the data is ready to answer them.
Led by Hive's managing partner in her role as the Global Vice President responsible for the strategy behind the carrier's sourcing organization.
The mid-market version is the same problem with fewer people pointed at it. A company up to $2B in revenue often carries a purchased services portfolio that no one owns end to end. It sits across legal, IT, HR and the business units, and rarely shows up as a single number in a board deck. The same AI disruption is moving through that supplier base, usually without a contract term that addresses it.
What we find is that companies at this size rarely need an enterprise transformation program to make progress. What tends to work is sizing where the savings are, choosing a small number of tools that fit, and placing ownership and governance inside procurement. That work runs in weeks rather than quarters.
A senior Hive advisor will walk you through how this work would apply to your procurement organization.
30 minutes · No pitch · Senior advisor · NDA before disclosure