LightSource's AI Workforce to Transform Direct Sourcing

LightSource has announced the arrival of its AI workforce, showcasing five new capabilities which aim to wipe out the manual work of sourcing in stages where time is most spent – data analytics, item ingestion, RFQs and supplier activation.

It believes that these new tools will allow procurement teams to instead focus on strategic work, bringing products to market faster at lower cost.

LightSource, which is an operating system for direct materials sourcing for enterprise procurement, says that even though it has been more than 20 years since the first sourcing software, only 18% of procurement teams use a professional sourcing tool. The firm says its platform is built for the 82% left behind, an AI-native operating system for direct materials sourcing that connects engineering, procurement and suppliers from first concept to award and gives AI the ability to act, not just advise.

“The direct procurement professional has been under-tooled for decades,” said Spencer Penn, CEO and Co-Founder of LightSource.

“We built LightSource to fix that. These new capabilities give CPOs the ability to act, not just advise, across the full sourcing cycle.”

Watch on YouTube: The 2025 Global Trade Reset Fireside Chat - Procurement LIVE Chicago 2025 (Procurement Magazine)

The direct procurement professional has been under-tooled for decades

Spencer Penn, CEO and Co-Founder of LightSource

Five new capabilities target the full sourcing cycle

Ask LightSource: Get instant answers without digging through spreadsheets. Users can ask plain-English questions about spend, suppliers, pipeline or sourcing history and receive data-grounded answers that standardise reporting and surface actionable insights for teams.

Item Ingestion & Data Clean-Up: Turn any file into clean item data. Drawings, spreadsheets, PDFs and images can simply be dropped in, with LightSource extracting and enhancing new and existing item properties and merging data to create consistency across items and BOMs, with relationships kept intact.

RFX Setup: Go from two weeks to 15 minutes. AI-built quote format templates create a standardised structure that boosts efficiency, cuts formatting time and can be reused across teams for future RFX events.

Supplier Activation: Suppliers respond without the chase. Questions are answered instantly, deadline reminders go out automatically and quotes arrive clean regardless of the format suppliers submit in.

Award Optimisation: Award with confidence. Users describe their requirements in plain language and set custom constraints, from cost to location to lead times, then optimise every scenario with outputs ready for negotiation and award.

“Every sourcing cycle, supplier interaction and award decision makes the system sharper,” adds Idan Mintz, CTO and Co-Founder of LightSource.

“That compounding context is the difference between a tool that assists and one that changes how a team works.”

Spencer sat down and spoke to Procurement Magazine to discuss 2025 AI Hype vs. Reality in Procurement - listen to the episode in full here

LightSource cofounders, CTO Idan Mintz and CEO Spencer Penn (Credit: LightSource)

Every sourcing cycle, supplier interaction and award decision makes the system sharper

Idan Mintz, CTO and Co-Founder of LightSource

Built on Trust, Proven at Scale

With more than 3,300 items processed and upwards of 250 quote formats created in the first two months, LightSource AI Workforce is live and built on an architecture that separates AI reasoning from data operations. The platform, which is trusted by Amazon, Conair, Canada Goose and Shure, requires user approval before anything executes, creating a meaningful distinction for teams who have been burned by AI that fabricates figures.

The mission to help support direct procurement has always been at the heart of LightSource. Speaking to Procurement Magazine, Spencer outlines that he believes in modern manufacturing, digital transformation often stumbles at the boundary between direct and indirect procurement. Indirect spend, the tail-spend category covering office supplies and travel, has seen substantial innovation. Direct materials, by contrast, remain stuck in manual processes.

Spencer describes this disparity through a vivid analogy: "The way I describe it is that indirect procurement is like UPS when it picks up a package. It has to route it and drop it off. It’s a one-time flow and it’s done. And then direct materials are much more like the plumbing in a building. You have to set it up right."

You can read Spencer’s latest interview with Procurement Magazine now.