Inside Utility Procurement: A Conversation with Gigawatt AI
Gary Storr from TYS sat down with Joe Berti, CEO, and PK Sridhar, VP of Products, at Gigawatt AI to discuss how they’re tackling today’s utility procurement challenges, and how Trust Your Supplier helps power that work. Watch the interview.
For most organizations, the honest answer is somewhere between three and five years ago.
Not because anyone decided that was often enough. Because checking more often would take people nobody has.
"Most procurement organizations don't have enough resources to check suppliers on a frequent enough basis," says Joe Berti, CEO of Gigawatt AI. "They would probably not admit this publicly, but we're seeing every three to five years a check on a supplier. That's not frequent. There's so many things that can change in that time frame."
He is blunt about why it persists. "You'd have to hire 100 people to do what's really needed, and the checks aren't being written to be able to do that."
Now set that interval against the last three to five years. A pandemic. Sanctions regimes that redrew supplier maps in weeks. Ownership changes, insolvencies, cyber incidents, raw material shortages nobody had modeled. Any organization reviewing a supplier on that cycle has spent most of the interval acting on information that was true once.
The review interval is not a risk decision. It is a resourcing outcome, and it has always been treated as acceptable because the alternative was not operationally possible. Technology has changed that math, and the gap is now where the risk sits.
A long order is a long bet
The cost of a stale supplier record scales with how long the relationship has to hold.
PK Sridhar, Gigawatt's VP of Products, describes what that looks like in utilities, where the capital projects now underway depend on equipment with lead times measured in years. "These projects heavily rely on long lead items like transformers and substations, and these things have a very long lead. A three-year cycle is not uncommon. So, your relationship with the supplier when you give an order lives for three years. Managing the risk over that span of time is very material, because any delivery risk results in a project risk and eventually a capital risk for the company."
This isn’t unique to utilities. Manufacturers waiting on tooling, life sciences firms sourcing clinical materials and enterprises tied to licensed software all face the same exposure: a long commitment backed by a supplier assessment that grows older every month. A supplier's financial position deteriorating in month eight of a thirty-six-month order is useful information in month eight. In month thirty, it is an explanation of what failed.
Over a three-year order, the question isn’t whether the supplier record is accurate and up-to-date. It’s whether anyone hears about it when things change, because they will. Sridhar calls this supplier drift and asks the question no one is answering: “How do you keep track of that?…”
Accurate now is not the same as defensible later
There is a second demand for supplier data that gets ignored more often than monitoring does.
For utilities, a decision has to hold up years after it’s made. Regulators review capital spending after the fact, asking not just what was decided but what was known at the time. That standard defined what Gigawatt needed from a supplier platform.
"Being able to continuously monitor is becoming an imperative," Sridhar says. "It's no longer like I can just monitor them at a point in time. Being able to have that verified history is going to be significantly important, not only for reliability and safety, but also for the actual rate case. Having an audit-ready document for any kind of prudence review was going to be critical for us."
Utilities have to justify their spending to regulators before they can pass costs on to customers. Most industries don’t face that exact test, but nearly all answer to someone, whether auditors, insurers, customers or boards, who will eventually ask why a supplier was approved and what was known at the time.
Collecting supplier information is the easy part. The harder part is keeping the evidence tied to the decision it supported, in a way that survives staff turnover and system changes. A supplier record that can’t explain why works fine until the day someone asks.
Risk is not one thing
A supplier can be clean on sanctions and failing financially. It can be financially sound and out of capacity. Monitoring one dimension produces confidence rather than coverage.
When Gigawatt evaluated supplier platforms, breadth was the first of two criteria. "We wanted a platform that can provide a 360 view of different risk dimensions, whether sanctions or an operational risk like capacity, or even a financial risk, because any one of those risks you have to continuously monitor," Sridhar says.
The second was adaptability. "Utilities have a lot of different regulations and they have to maintain them and they're changing constantly. So being able to quickly adapt to any new regulatory changes, and having the right workflows and capabilities in the platform, so that operationally we can drive that change fairly quickly."
That second criterion is the one most evaluations miss. The compliance requirements a platform satisfies on day one are not the requirements it will face in two years, and the cost of every change lands on whoever owns the workflows.
The exposure now arrives through the supply chain
What "knowing your supplier" has to cover has widened, and security is the clearest example.
"There's a lot of bad actors trying to embed software inside of systems," Berti says. "The level of attacks, the type of attacks, how savvy some of the vendors are with embedded chips, with embedded software, with backdoors in them. All the devices now are IoT enabled, which makes it even worse."
The exposure is not confined to major equipment purchases. It runs through the routine ones that no review process looks at. "Think of all the vendors that you're buying equipment from. It could be a gas generator, but it also could be your IT vendor for hardware, for both computers and even simple stuff like phone accessories."
And it extends past the suppliers an organization has a contract with. "Nobody ever thought there would have been a pandemic, and no one ever would have thought you had to check your supplier's supplier's supplier to see if they're getting neon gas from Ukraine. You just can't predict everything that's going to happen. So you need to be more dynamic, because what has been true is that things change."
It’s not that organizations need better forecasting. It is that they need a supplier data foundation capable of adapting to change and answering a question that nobody anticipated, quickly, when it arrives.
None of it works on fragmented data
All of the above assumes there is a supplier record to monitor. Often there isn't one, there are several.
Sridhar describes customers running two dozen systems across the procurement lifecycle that do not talk to each other, leaving the person making a sourcing decision without the information to make it well. Berti is blunter about how the market got that way: "The procurement software market's been underinvested. It's very fragmented, and part of that is the procurement team's fault. They don't like spending money. They're good at negotiating, so they've created this fragmented software market."
In practice, that means one supplier can show up in onboarding, ERP, contract management, risk screening and accounts payable, each with its own version of the truth. A bank account gets updated in one system and not another. A certification expires in one place while another still shows it as valid. Nobody has the full picture, and nobody knows which version is right.
That’s why fragmentation is more than an IT headache. It’s a risk problem. Continuous monitoring, verified history and audit-ready evidence all depend on one trusted supplier record. Without it, even the best monitoring tools are just watching seven different versions of the same supplier, and the most important change can easily land in the one system nobody checks.
What this takes
Utilities are a demanding version of this problem: multi-year lead times, prudence review, grid security obligations, and a capital build-out arriving faster than annual planning can absorb. That environment is part of why Gigawatt built its utility platform on Trust Your Supplier rather than assembling the foundation itself.
But the requirements it exposes are not sector-specific. A supplier record that stays accurate rather than merely submitted. Compliance evidence that stays attached to the decision it supported. Risk monitored continuously and across dimensions rather than reviewed on a cycle. One governed record instead of several, connected to the systems an organization already runs.
That is what Trust Your Supplier has been building since 2018, for procurement, compliance, finance and IT teams in manufacturing, energy, financial services, insurance, telecommunications and life sciences.
If your supplier reviews currently run on a three-to-five-year cycle, the question worth asking is not whether that is good enough. It is what you would need in place to stop working that way.
A supplier you checked three years ago is a supplier you don’t really know. Suppliers don’t change on your review schedule. They change on theirs. The organizations that stay ahead won’t be the ones with the most thorough annual review. They’ll be the ones that find out first.
Read about Gigawatt's Utility Supplier Network, built in partnership with Trust Your Supplier.