Is your supply chain a competitive advantage, or your biggest liability waiting to be exposed? Agility requires preparing for the unpredictable, especially when your brand’s ability to deliver hinges on global events that are entirely out of your control. In a world of political unrest, regulatory change, and natural disasters, the brands that win are the ones who can pivot fast — without losing their balance. Today we’re going to talk about the crucial connection between modern supply chain strategy and brand agility. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Salvatore Lombardo, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Coupa.
About Salvatore Lombardo
Salvatore “Salva” Lombardo is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Coupa. Lombardo leads Coupa’s innovation roadmap and is responsible for its vision, articulation, and execution. Lombardo was previously Chief Product Officer for SAP Ariba, where he was responsible for leading its global product team, roadmap, engineering, and delivery.
Prior to that, he was Senior Vice President, Head of SAP S/4HANA Source to Pay & Order to Cash. Lombardo was instrumental in leading the development organization through SAP’s largest shift from on-premise to cloud. He harmonized and built SAP’s spend portfolio and deployed the innovation roadmap at scale. Over two decades at SAP< he held various product and development management roles across procurement, suppliers, logistics, warehouse, customer management, and custom projects. Lombardo holds a master’s degree in business informatics and administration from the University of Mannheim.
Resources
Coupa: https://www.coupa.com https://www.coupa.com
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
Is your supply chain a competitive advantage or your biggest liability waiting to be exposed? Agility requires preparing for the unpredictable, especially when your brand’s ability to deliver hinges on global events that are entirely out of your control. In a world of political unrest, regulatory change, and natural disasters, the brands that win are the ones who can pivot fast without losing their balance. Today, we’re going to talk about the crucial connection between modern supply chain strategy and brand agility.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Salvo Lombardo, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Coupa. Salvo, welcome to the show.
Salvatore Lombardo (00:37)
Hi, Greg. Thank you for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom (00:39)
Yeah, absolutely looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely a timely topic here before we dive in though. Why don’t we start with you giving a little background on yourself and what you’re currently doing at Kuba.
Salvatore Lombardo (00:51)
Oh, sure, sure. So yeah, I’m at Cooper. Cooper joined like, well, three quarter of a year ago. So it feels like a long time already happened a lot. Very, very, very, very nice time I have having there. And I’m since 20 years, roughly, in the space of supply chain and procurement. Basically run a lot of procurement technology a product at SAP, so one of a big SaaS vendors too. And yeah, and decided to stay in that space and do my best with Coupa. Yeah, that’s me. So Chief and Product Technology Officer, obviously, you know, heading product and engineering, cloud ops, everything when it comes to getting the product into a service and getting it to the clients.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:39)
Perfect. Well, yeah, let’s we’re going to talk about a few things here. But I want to start with this idea of resilience and risk. And so when you look at how brands are handling disruption in 2025, surely there’s a lot of things, political unrest, regulatory changes, climate challenges and more. What do you think is missing from these brands approach to supply chain resilience?
Salvatore Lombardo (02:05)
Yeah, well, missing is always like a little bit difficult to say because obviously, the point is all brands do good business, right? mean, if there would not be good business, they would have maybe reacted even before. And that’s why missing is always, think, exactly the key word. Do I recognize that it’s missing? I think the two, three triggers to see this is, for example, do I really judge rightly risk profiles of my suppliers? It’s just a very interesting, very easy basic question it seems, but I think that’s where missing parts are because if you don’t do a really diligent way on judging your suppliers, if they are the right ones, from a risk profile perspective, that’s the part which I’m seeing as a pattern. Or a second could be like, hey, how much?
How much automation do I have in my recognition of problematics in my supply chain? Be it now, be it now, you know, the place of where I supply, how much is this in any case automated enough that I can really immediately see like, there is some geopolitical problem or that I can see like, there is a thunderstorm or whatever happens, right? That’s a missing part. And maybe to mention a third one, and that’s maybe one which is very near to the current situation, how much can I really immediately at least judge and simulate the, you know, I call it this tariff, the tariff situations at the moment, because every day maybe some new idea comes and not because of the tariffs itself. It can be a strategy, it can be whatever, but US business need to immediately translate this into your impact. And I think that’s a missing piece too, that then the simulation takes partly longer than maybe the reactions you should have. So that’s the three themes I would say, Greg, which I see today ⁓ in many brands happening.
Greg Kihlstrom (04:06)
Yeah, yeah. And certainly there’s a lot of considerations of making a brand successful, you know why supply chain strategy is maybe it’s not mentioned quite as much as some other things, you know, like go to market strategy and some of those very like customer facing, maybe the flashier things. But, you know, why is supply chain strategy one of the most important tools in a brand’s arsenal when it comes to staying agile and competitive?
Salvatore Lombardo (04:35)
Yeah, I guess it plays into also the missing parts because I think to sum this up is the speed of reaction. You can translate this into if you do not have a supply chain strategy, are you really prepared to speedy enough react on certain changes? That’s how I would really simply put it. If you don’t have it, don’t, you know, be not surprised that you can’t react quickly. That’s how I would put it and just…
Very easy words. Obviously you can go deeper like how quickly am I to adapt a new supplier? How quickly am I to understand new routes for my supply chain, which needs to come, right? So all of this, Greg, obviously lays this down a few layers, but at the end, you can always sum it up. If I don’t have a strategy and it’s not only supply chain, it’s also a spend strategy, a supplier strategy, a category spend strategy. If you don’t have this, your reaction speed is not as quick as your competition speed.
Greg Kihlstrom (05:34)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think that also speaks to, you know, including supply chain, but beyond the diversification, right? So it’s relying too heavily on a single region, relying too heavily on a supplier. You know, what are some of the mistakes that you see companies making when building or failing to build a diversified supply chain?
Salvatore Lombardo (05:59)
Yeah. ⁓ Well, I think the most obvious mistake is ⁓ don’t… this is obviously being at Coupa, I now have the data set available and it’s maybe easy for me obviously to say this, because I can provide this to our customers. But I mean this really from my absolutely experience, the transparency of
your business in data points, in figures, in number of suppliers per material, spend per suppliers per material, supply chain diversification in the sense of how much am I getting the supply from different countries to balance my risks. All of this is for me transparency of your business when it comes to spend and supply chain, Greg. And I think that’s what I see I in all respect, think every brand has so excellent strategies. But this is when I need to look the first time into it. This is what in nine of 10 cases I see not being there. Not necessarily because of missing digitalization. think many brands have understood that you better digitalize. think that’s over. But not the right tools and system support for procurement business supply chain.
to have the transparency on their data. And that’s where I would put the very, very first baseline when you get started and want to do strategy. Get the data set, get a company which can give you those data and then doing benchmarks and start from there on getting more and more excellent.
Greg Kihlstrom (07:42)
Yeah, yeah. So let’s talk a little bit more about that then. You technology, you know, as you mentioned clearly plays a role in agility of the supply chain. Maybe start a little bit with, and I want to talk a little bit more generally about AI and some other things as well. you know, can you talk a little bit about what CUPA does and the role that it plays? And then I want to talk a little bit more about AI in general.
Salvatore Lombardo (08:05)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, just very quickly because we should not spend every day. You should, I’m absolutely, you know, so super keen to talk about the business though. think Kuba is the technology provider for an end-to-end business when it comes from supply chain to sourcing, contracting, you know, with suppliers to the operative, operative, operative, operational part.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:09)
Yeah, I think
Salvatore Lombardo (08:29)
the pay part, right? Me being, you know, like getting the, paying the suppliers quicker, everything which is about the invoicing part. And then on the other side, as we are building the network, which runs and powers the global trade, then the supplier offering. So suppliers in the same network, you know, creating the profile, creating the risk profile, uploading the certification. And with this matching the dataset I was talking about, and we call ourselves
the business spend platform because we know the spend end to end from the very start strategy to the very end paying it, right? And then obviously with supplier inputs in the middle. So that’s Greg, how you can roughly explain the platform.
Greg Kihlstrom (09:10)
Yeah, and I think that’s a good… knowing that and knowing that view that you have on this, certainly, AI is playing a big role in all aspects of business from end end as well. How are you seeing tools like AI tools, whether it’s predictive or other planning tools or other things, how are you seeing AI playing a role in making it easier for brands to be more proactive versus reactive in such a volatile state of things?
Salvatore Lombardo (09:40)
I mean, obviously a spot on question because this is the number one question the CTOs ask me too. And Greg, are, but you know, I’m starting, I like to start this answer with one thing I love to say because I was long time enough also on the business side of the house and not only technology. Honestly, should not worry about the word AI.
Because the word AI itself is a technology. It’s a wonderful technology disruption. That’s it. But the disruption itself is no value yet for the business, ⁓ And the value is now my duty as a technology provider, as a vendor for software ⁓ and for SaaS, to turn AI into a business value. So that’s why AI itself will not bring value.
If the vendor of choice is not making the best out of it. That’s Greg, how I like to in general answer the AI question, because I’m getting often the question from CTOs or business like, Hey, how can I leverage AI? Well, it’s your vendor, which needs to leverage AI and then deliver for you the right SaaS services, which are AI empowered, which again can, you know, double down on what services could be delivered compared to others. So that’s how I see, at least as a Coupa, our duty for our customers. And then it comes obviously to the business value. And the business value is for me to make the unpredictable today predictable. I think that’s a theme which I like to really, really often spend on the time because if I would just argue with automation, would jump to not far enough.
Because the unpredictable is the things which today is really hard for businesses to predict. Obviously they call it unpredictable. That’s why it’s a little bit of a world pain. but the AI with the technology on scanning and having this multiple skills, which you today can’t even imagine. You see this in a business in a normal private life. If you ask JGTB a question, and we are not using this because we use more the business LLM models, but you get my point. You get answers which like, my God, I would have not predicted that they know that, right? And that’s the point of unpredictability in business. And the second part obviously being, you know, the speed and the upskilling of my today business. Meaning what today maybe I have a lot of manual and let’s say not the most strategic tasks, would shift into much more automated and strategic operations, which the other ones will be done by AI as AI is that intelligent that you can trust that my services will deliver this. And I think those two areas is how I would describe it. And just one concrete example and just close this.
Imagine an onboarding as a service for suppliers in the supply chain, right? Which is AI enabled. So an intelligent AI agent helps suppliers to onboard because all this immense data set are anyway there. They are either on the Coupa platform or they are either on an internet place where the supplier can say like, yeah, that’s it. That’s my certification. Yes, that’s they’re judging me rightly. No, that’s wrong. Correct. That one. And then a wonderful profile with an AI agent will be created. what we are working at the moment on, which makes just the onboarding one day a non-event. It’s just there. And I think that’s just an example for how AI will help, at least with Coupa, to make the business life easier.
Greg Kihlstrom (13:21)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, as you mentioned, it’s solely thinking about the automation and the workflow doesn’t kind of do the opportunity justice as far as some of the AI stuff goes. there are incredible. mean, even the examples that you just mentioned, I mean, that’s an incredible time savings and everything like that as well. In addition to the technological part of
prediction and all that. what do businesses, when you’re able to predict better and react more easily, what does that mean for the business in maybe from the operational standpoint? So in other words, they’re going to have these tools that enable them to pivot better, but they’re used to whatever three, six, 12 month projections and the processes aren’t necessarily in place. Like what is…
What does that mean for a leader that’s trying to anticipate these these things being available but has a team that’s kind of thinking five years ago?
Salvatore Lombardo (14:24)
Yeah,
yeah. Well, there may be three areas. One, I touched the very beginning of our talk. You remember that I said speed. Yeah. I think it’s all about speed. Honestly, that’s the top one. And you can argue that in every area that if you really start that journey as a business together, obviously with your IT department and with the right vendor of choice, software choice on the SaaS platform, I think one top result is
much more day-to-day calculation, which you can work ⁓ from now in maybe a few minutes on recalculating every kind of simulation. We are seeing at the moment a 50 to 100 times quicker, for example, logistic network scenario calculation by changing one parameter, which in the past took us maybe a day. We can do now in a very quick way that know, the buyer, the source of the category manager can immediately and also the supply chain operator can quickly do decisions on seeing like what changes if I’m increasing the tariff 0.1 % here. And then you get three scenarios and you continue, right? So this simulation is, believe it or not, is a highly, highly complex thing. And the compute and AI allows us today a much, much quicker way on doing this. So that’s just making an example, right? That’s number one. Number two is
And this is maybe an exciting thing for all. I call this internally that AI will be the new user experience. So what do I mean with this? I’m an absolutely believer and we are working towards this, that one day the menu and module way of working how we are used today, right? Whatever we use, like even buying something as a consumer will disappear. I’m absolutely a believer in that one day, at least for easy to medium complex tasks, a conversational AI agent, in our case, it’s Cooper and Neby, we call this agent Cooper and Neby, will be that intelligent that you don’t need to do anything except of talking or typing with this agent and doing the rest of your work. And be it also supply chain scenarios, be it risk assessment, be it the way on ordering, you know, just a simple task on operational procurement.
But all of this will be step-by-step replaced by agents and intelligent agents and not necessarily modules. So that’s number two. I think what I also see is like, and this is a way of the slice and dice of how you look at data, analyzing them instantly, understanding what is going with your business is something which will, if you do it right, will be just a…
would become a table stake of everybody, which is working in procurement. Meaning, know, an instant ⁓ question to Navi, which is again, our AI agent from Coupa, or maybe a prompt or a button click that you get immediately the view of your transparent spend data, of your transparent supply chain routes, where where our disruption, that the future will be like data insight and then action and not like menu modules and then finding out in which menu. It will be like, hey, give me the data, what happens? Okay, then please do this. And that’s how I see this world moving. At least this is what we do at Coupa and want to be obviously the first being there and showing that it is possible.
Greg Kihlstrom (18:00)
Yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah, that’s exciting. Well, Salva, thanks so much for joining today and for your ideas and insights. One last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Salvatore Lombardo (18:15)
Wow. That’s a good one. Well, think I’m trying always. I think there’s like a little ritual I have or how to say, know, like I’m having always my, I’m putting the phone for a few maximum an hour away and I’m trying to read still paper. I mean, even if it sounds like very odd, but it’s still as being a really front runner in software. I’m, I’m loved to read it. It just gets me back into my brain working, so to say, the read and understand. For some reason it works so well for me. Just getting a site to the phone for an hour or so in the evening when I’m just trying to relax, that brings me, that charges me for the next 24 hours. You know, if you include a little sleep, I’m back in the next day. So I’m doing this quite regularly. It helps me so much to just stay very up to, but, and reading obviously, you know, the newest in the software area and procurement space and supply chain space. So that’s how I’m keeping up with this. And well, then I’m super passionate for that area. So I love this area and I just want to make it, you know, disrupt and revolutionize it.
