Ross Garrigan
Senior Director of Marketing at apexanalytix
Speaking at TFEST26: Wednesday, December 2 2026 at 12:15–12:45 on the Innovation Stage: “Don't Automate Bad Supplier Data: 3 Controls to Fix Before You Scale AI”.
About Ross
With his background in third-party risk management, Ross understands the realities facing risk teams and the cost of poor supplier data. Ross travels across Europe and North America meeting Procurement, Risk and Compliance leaders at the world’s largest companies to understand and share their challenges in supplier management and third-party risk. In this session, he shares what those conversations reveal about supplier data and the three controls to fix before scaling AI. Expect practical, candid insight drawn from the people closest to these problems.
Session Overview
The Hackett Group's research puts a 75% performance gap between organizations that redesign work around AI and those that simply automate the process they already have. In procurement and finance, the fastest way into the second group is to point an agent at a supplier master nobody has verified. This session walks the three controls that make supplier data safe enough to automate: verify supplier identity and bank account ownership at the source, protect the data you collect against a decryption timeline that starts in 2029, and anticipate supplier failure with scenario modeling rather than alerts. You'll see real-world data on what verification actually finds, questions to add to supplier onboarding, and the evidence an agentic workflow has to produce before it scales past pilot.
About TFEST26
TFEST26 is Europe's most senior supply chain conference, taking place December 1–2 2026 at Colosseum Berlin. It brings together 400+ Director-level and above leaders (Chief Supply Chain Officers, VPs, and senior directors from Cisco, Henkel, Estée Lauder, Diageo, Schneider Electric, Novartis, Mars, and others) for two days of peer benchmarking, candid practitioner firesides, themed roundtables, and pre-scheduled 1:1 meetings.