Gartner recognizes Keelvar as the only vendor offering both advanced Sourcing Optimization and Autonomous Sourcing in Market Guide for Sourcing Applications 2025

The ProcureTech landscape is evolving faster than ever, with AI-driven solutions rapidly transforming procurement processes. This can add complexity for procurement teams looking to roll out tech in 2025 when it comes to identifying the right tool for their specific challenges, and ensuring their investments are in technology that will not be outpaced by competitors. 

The report 

Gartner’s Market Guide for Sourcing Applications 2025 highlights the growing role of AI and automation in procurement, with sourcing technology evolving to drive cost savings, efficiency, and resilience. The report identifies three key sourcing solution categories – Standard Sourcing, Advanced Sourcing Optimization, and Autonomous Sourcing – each catering to different levels of complexity and automation needs. AI-driven sourcing, particularly autonomous sourcing, is gaining traction as organisations look to streamline procurement processes and reduce manual workload.

To navigate this complex market, Gartner recommend that organisations align their sourcing technology with their strategic objectives, assess potential vendor overlaps within their existing tech stack, and prioritise user-friendly, AI-powered solutions that drive efficiency and cost savings. Investing in automation and AI-driven sourcing capabilities will be crucial for procurement teams looking to optimize spend and enhance resilience in a rapidly shifting market.

Combining 2 sourcing solutions to scale sourcing excellence

In the report, Keelvar stands out as the only vendor recognised for both Advanced Sourcing Optimization (SO) and Autonomous Sourcing (AS), reinforcing its position as an industry leader. By combining SO and AS in one platform, market leading organizations like Coca Cola, Maersk and Apple are not only achieving sourcing excellence, but also scaling it across their entire organization.

Advanced Sourcing Optimization

Advanced sourcing optimization capabilities enable procurement teams to evaluate complex sourcing scenarios at speed and with precision. Using AI-powered scenario analysis, game theory, and constraint-based decision-making, Keelvar ensures optimal supplier selection while factoring in both cost and non-cost variables like sustainability and risk. It empowers teams to be nimble, and make faster decisions by arming themselves with more data. 

Autonomous Sourcing

Keelvar Autonomous Sourcing enables procurement teams to easily turn previously manual and time-consuming sourcing tasks into automated workflows that can be customized to follow sourcing and procurement best practice.. By integrating this solution with other components of their tech stack (e.g. CLM, TMS, ERP, etc.), teams get fully automated and touchless sourcing. This significantly reduces cycle times and frees up time to focus on strategic initiatives.

Why Sourcing Optimization and Autonomous Sourcing work best together? 

Sourcing optimization is primarily used for strategic events where complexity is common and evaluating award scenarios and making data-driven decisions is critical. Sourcing optimization drives significant savings (as much as 25%) which in turn, typically generates instant ROI. Thanks to Keelvar’s user-friendliness, the very first sourcing event can be set up in a matter of a few hours. It can then instantly be converted into autonomous sourcing workflows. What’s more, Keelvar autonomous sourcing events also leverage sourcing optimization to drive more competitive bidding, and therefore the best sourcing outcomes, even on lower value spend.

As a result, Procurement teams get access to a platform that:

  • Delivers lightning-fast speed to value (most of our customers are fully onboarded within 4 weeks)
  • Pays for itself after one event
  • Scales instantly to all spend types and categories while enforcing best-practice
  • Enables teams to spend their time only on the most strategic activities while running more events that all yield the best sourcing outcome, with less effort. 

What This Means for Procurement

This combination of Advanced Sourcing Optimization and Autonomous Sourcing in one platform allows Procurement teams to:

✅ Systematically drive the best sourcing outcomes (savings, lower risk, sustainability)
✅ Re-focus their time on strategic activities such as building supplier relationships
✅ Become a strategic function that has an impact on more than the bottom line  

With exciting planned releases in 2025 such as AI Sourcing Agents, Keelvar is an ideal addition to Procurement organizations’ tech stack, guaranteed to deliver results now and in the future. 

Click here to see it in action.