Alex Yakubovich, Co-Founder and CEO of Levelpath – Interview Series

Alex Yakubovich, Co-Founder and CEO of Levelpath, is a seasoned technology entrepreneur who has spent his career building and scaling procurement and operations software. Before launching Levelpath in 2022, he served as GM of Spend at Workday following its acquisition of Scout RFP, where he was Vice President and previously CEO after co-founding and growing the company into a leading sourcing platform. Earlier roles at ONOSYS and LivingSocial further strengthened his background in enterprise operations, product development, and digital transformation.

Levelpath is an AI-driven procurement platform built to simplify and modernize how enterprises manage sourcing, contracts, suppliers, and spend. Its system unifies workflows that traditionally sit across multiple disconnected tools, using automation and intelligent data processing to eliminate friction, improve visibility, and accelerate decision-making. Designed for usability and scale, Levelpath enables organizations to streamline procurement processes, reduce risk, and operate with greater efficiency across the entire procurement lifecycle.

After leading Spend at Workday and previously scaling Scout RFP into one of the most recognized procurement platforms, what experiences or pain points from those years ultimately pushed you to create Levelpath as an AI-native procurement system?

My co-founder, Stan Garber, and I built Scout RFP to help organizations simplify sourcing. While on that journey, we saw how disjointed procurement processes caused frustration, headaches and delays, as early as intake. After Scout RFP was acquired by Workday, we continued to hear the same story. Procurement was anything but delightful, and everyday users couldn’t get past the difficulties of complex, fragmented processes.

We observed firsthand at Workday how complicated buying can be in a big company, and we saw a major opportunity. These organizations likely have preferred suppliers for everything from professional services to company swag. However, the likelihood that every potential end user at a company knows that supplier information is low because there is a lot of siloed knowledge and complexity. With so many complications for the business user and procurement, we set out to make procurement delightful.

When Stan and I developed our vision for Levelpath, we realized the opportunity in creating a platform that was built with AI from the ground up. The procurement experience needed to be reinvented in a way that prioritized the people using the system. We developed Levelpath as an AI-native, supplier-centric procurement platform focused on intake-to-procure. Our goal is to enable delightful procurement by giving teams faster and earlier ways to work together.

Many procurement tools still rely on legacy architectures. How did you design Levelpath to be AI-native from day one, and what practical advantages does that give your users?

Legacy tools are unable to bridge the gap between what businesses now need and what legacy tools can actually deliver. Like most back-office business processes, procurement has undergone significant changes in the last two decades. It only makes sense that the technology supporting procurement functions also needs extreme transformation, especially with the Generative AI advancements we have at our fingertips right now.

Rather than trying to retrofit Generative AI and custom large language models into legacy software systems, we built Levelpath as a truly AI-native procurement solution. Starting with a clean slate at the start of the Generative AI era means every workflow and interaction was designed with AI-native capabilities. This intelligent design is an advantage for our users because any SaaS procurement software solutions made before 2022 were not built from the ground up with Generative AI in mind.

Embedding AI into procurement is a major theme right now. How does Levelpath use AI to automate complex sourcing, vendor management, and contract-related workflows?

Levelpath’s AI agents automate repetitive tasks like building questionnaires for sourcing events, collecting supplier onboarding information, and conducting risk reviews to free teams up to focus on strategy. The agents bring contextual intelligence to workflows and help teams spot risks and ensure contract compliance.

Since intelligence is embedded throughout Levelpath via our Hyperbridge reasoning engine, the platform can understand user intent and reduce manual effort. This means faster deployment, better adoption across the business and more informed decisions that deliver better business outcomes. All supplier, contract and sourcing data also lives in one unified model, meaning AI agents can take action across the procurement lifecycle. Streamlining these tedious, time-consuming manual processes provides procurement with the chance to move from reactive to strategic.

Indirect spend is often the hardest category to control. How does your platform help companies gain deeper visibility, reduce leakage, and navigate tariff-related volatility?

Indirect spend categories are often fragmented across departments and various systems, which makes it hard to see costs creep in real-time. Companies that rely on manual spreadsheets, static reports, or disconnected systems can’t keep up with shifts, and tariff impacts are often buried in documents that leaders do not have access to or see until budgets are already affected.

Levelpath solves all of this by identifying at-risk supplier categories and helps reallocate indirect spend more strategically. AI-driven procurement provides leaders with a single, real-time view of indirect spend. Our platform will flag early indicators of cost spikes, like rising material costs, contract anomalies or tariff-related price shifts. Supply chain leaders can then respond immediately, rather than waiting weeks for reports or learning about price increases after an invoice hits.

Additionally, with Levelpath’s AI Agents, leaders can ask natural language questions about their agreements and receive clause-level answers in seconds. This allows all teams to dig further into their contracts for potential changes amid volatility and react preemptively.

You’ve spoken about creating AI agents that genuinely add value for B2B buyers. What does “useful” actually look like in a procurement context, and what separates effective agents from superficial ones?

When it comes to AI agents in procurement, practical integration matters more than technical sophistication. Early enterprise agents failed because they acted like chatbots or bolted-on automations instead of true digital specialists. Procurement teams need agents that behave like informed collaborators, providing precise, contextual, and trustworthy outputs.

A useful agent starts with the right foundation. If the underlying supplier, contract, and sourcing data is not unified and properly trained into the model, the agent can’t reason or act reliably. That is why AI-native platforms like Levelpath train agents directly on a company’s actual workflows and data structure, allowing them to operate with context instead of guesswork.

To find agents that add value, buyers should ask, “Does this agent solve a real pain point?” High-impact agents tie directly to business goals, whether it is accelerating sourcing cycles, strengthening supplier relationships or reducing cost and risk. When agents are trained on a unified dataset and embedded within an AI-native architecture, they unlock a level of operational intelligence and agility that helps teams reshape how they do business.

Procurement touches finance, legal, risk, and suppliers. How does Levelpath bring these stakeholders together so workflows, data, and communication flow more naturally?

Levelpath bridges cross-functional teams by enabling anyone across the organization to participate in standardized workflows. Centralizing procurement data makes collaboration and visibility much simpler for reporting and tracking. In an agent-powered, user-friendly interface, stakeholders can efficiently request, review and collaborate on intake, sourcing, and contracts. This makes approval workflows painless.

Levelpath also improves global collaboration by removing language barriers. Suppliers can write in their native language and executives will receive summaries in their own.

Can you share a concrete example of how Levelpath has changed the day-to-day life of a procurement team—whether through speed, cost reduction, or improved supplier collaboration?

Levelpath set out to make the procurement process genuinely delightful, and we accomplish this by creating intuitive and reliable workflows for procurement teams with faster innovation and scalable automation. As a result, our customers have saved time and money on traditionally manual processes.

For example:

• GATX reduced RFP cycle time from months to minutes and achieved 10x sourcing capacity per procurement employee, resulting in $3.5 million in contract savings. GATX applied Levelpath’s AI agents to centralize documents, replace legacy workflows and drive faster results.
• Acrisure achieved 10x sourcing capacity per procurement employee while managing 80% of addressable spend by implementing Levelpath as the company’s first procurement system. Levelpath’s quick deployment, efficient scaling and smart sourcing tools delivered immediate value.
• PADNOS saved 6,000 hours of fleet downtime with 76% faster procurement cycles and a 5x increase in sourcing projects per procurement employee by enabling direct connections with suppliers and reducing downtime.
• Western Union achieved a 60% reduction in review time for supplier Master Service Agreements and saved weeks during annual audit cycles by gaining full visibility into their contract landscape.

Global supply chains continue to face unpredictable pressures. How does AI help organizations sense risks earlier and respond more strategically?

Supply chain pressures like tariffs and inflation are a persistent reality. Procurement leaders need tools that help them plan, not just react to unpredictable pressures. AI capabilities like Levelpath’s Optical Character Recognition and intelligent search help surface contract clauses tied to keywords around tariffs, the Consumer Price Index and inflation. With this transparency, organizations can determine risks before they cause budgetary problems.

Using our solution, a healthcare client analyzed 30,000 documents in minutes, work that would have taken over 3,350 hours manually. By surfacing contract risks that were previously hidden, their teams could renegotiate unfavorable terms, catch upcoming renewals, and identify better alternatives. This capability also elevated procurement’s strategic value, enabling them to surface critical contract intelligence for executive leadership quickly and easily, positioning the team as a proactive business partner rather than just a processing function. This proactive strategy eliminates costly surprises and safeguards financial performance.

When companies adopt AI-driven procurement for the first time, what cultural or operational barriers do you see most often, and how should leaders navigate them?

AI has the power to revolutionize business, which is evident when almost 80% of organizations are using AI in at least one business function. However, the reality is that only 1% successfully scale those initiatives past a pilot program. Internal applications of AI bolted on to legacy solutions are holding companies back, frustrating employees and preventing organizations from seeing 5x ROI.

Leaders will often pursue an AI solution because they are focused on the technology’s features rather than the business outcomes it can deliver. To achieve actual value from AI-driven procurement solutions, organizations need to start with pilot programs that solve specific pain points, choose problems where AI creates immediate impact and plan for scalability.

Overall, organizations need to stop investing in retrofitted solutions that will hit walls and require workarounds that do not exist for AI-native platforms. Leaders need to build the right foundation by choosing AI-native solutions that avoid integration challenges and will evolve as procurement operations continue to transform.

As AI continues to evolve, where do you see procurement technology heading over the next three to five years, and how is Levelpath positioning itself for that future? 

I see the agent-led economy reshaping enterprise procurement. This year, AI agents made the leap from consumer trend to enterprise disruptor, and that shift is going to continue extrapolating. The biggest AI-led transformations are happening in how business gets done, and that extends to procurement in particular. An enterprise no longer needs an overflow of buyers to navigate fragmented legacy systems.

Levelpath’s AI-native platform lets organizations source, negotiate and close with total transparency and immediacy. AI Agents are already evaluating suppliers, uncovering risks and accelerating deals at a pace that redefines modern business. Moving forward, AI Agents will stop assisting and start operating, reshaping what enterprise performance looks like from the inside out.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Levelpath.