Advertise on podcast: Algo Ego with Jason Busch

I started my career in consulting in 1997 with a degree in history and English literature and no business training, because back then that’s what consulting was for. Nearly thirty years later, procurement still runs on the PowerPoint operating platform. In the season finale of Algo Ego, I go solo to take apart the procurement consulting market: a roughly $10 billion slice of a $350 billion industry that is now running head-first into software. I go firm by firm: McKinsey and Lilli, BCG’s 300-plus agents, Bain and Proxima, Kearney and its new joint product with Beroe, Accenture’s buying spree from Procurian to Insight Sourcing, Deloitte, Efficio, and GEP, my sleeper pick for growth. Then the uncomfortable part. If an agent can do the analyst’s work faster, better and cheaper, what happens to the pyramid? My bet, and I may get in trouble for this, is that the winners will look a lot more like GEP than McKinsey. And the firms bragging about agents should be bragging about clean data instead. It’s the unsexy stuff, and it’s the stuff that matters. Disclosure up front: Gain underwrites this show and may compete with some of these firms, so nullius in verba. The season closes with Dor Israeli live from Tel Aviv. He argues for the AI companies, and I argue for the consultants. Chapters00:00 Disclosures: Thirty Years In, and Who Pays for This Show01:55 A $350 Billion Industry Meets Software05:10 Forty Years on the PowerPoint Operating Platform07:22 Strategy Firms, the Big Five, and the Boutiques10:16 McKinsey: Lilli, QuantumBlack, and Orpheus15:38 BCG’s 300 Agents and Inverto17:53 Bain, Proxima, and the Cost Takeout Playbook19:52 Kearney, the Chessboard, and Beroe22:34 Accenture’s Buying Spree27:21 Deloitte and the Rest of the Big Five29:07 GEP: The Sleeper Pick32:09 Efficio and eFlow33:13 From Human in the Loop to Human on the Loop35:50 Who Wins, and Why the Unsexy Stuff Matters37:57 From Billing Hours to Charging for Outcomes41:15 Live From Tel Aviv: Dor Israeli Closes Season One

Every few weeks I try to buy data for Gain, and every few weeks the provider sends me a quote priced per seat. Per seat. For an agent. In this episode of Algo Ego I bring Lisa Reisman back on — co-founder and CEO of MetalMiner, and the person I argue about this with at home — to work through the whole procurement data market and why almost none of it survives contact with an agent. We cover the three buckets buyers actually pay for (entity and risk, supply chain, category and commodity), how a price becomes a benchmark in the first place, and forty years of delivery formats that were all, without exception, built for a human to read at the end. Then the part that keeps me up: an MCP isn't a new distribution channel for your annual contract. The consumer is an agent, it pays per query, and it doesn't want a subscription. Lisa is building that pricing model right now, credit by credit, and she's honest about the cost — the incumbents are sitting on a golden goose, and this asks them to slay it. It's a geeky episode. I hope the data providers are listening. Chapters 00:00 — Why This One's a Geeky Episode 01:36 — Three Buckets: Entity, Supply Chain, Category 04:33 — How a Price Actually Becomes a Benchmark 09:36 — PDFs, Portals, CSVs, APIs: Forty Years of Delivery 13:08 — What Changes When the Reader Isn't Human 15:13 — Why an LLM Can't Forecast Without Ten Years of History 17:56 — What an MCP Is, and Why We Never See Your Data 22:15 — Credits, Gating, and the Crown Jewels 27:38 — When the Agent Carries the P-Card 32:12 — Slaying the Golden Goose

Nobody dies when a SaaS company overpays for a startup, but the CFO might want to. In this edition of Algo Ego, I put on my hybrid analyst hat and deconstruct Coupa: four acquisitions in twelve months (Cirtuo, Scoutbee, Rossum, and the big one, Tonkean), the Thoma Bravo take-private and the debt sitting underneath it, and a positioning line, "cloud-native agentic trade network," that I don't think does justice to why anyone actually buys Coupa. I'm not here to bury Coupa. Tonkean is a smart, defensive move: Zip had managed to out-Coupa Coupa at the front door, and this is Coupa buying back the front door it pioneered. Call four deals in twelve months a roadmap if you like. I'd call it a confession with a press release attached. A lot of the numbers here are my own back-of-napkin modeling, so, nullius in verba, on the word of no one. The episode closes with my Gain colleague Dor Israeli in Tel Aviv on what AI-first architecture actually demands. Chapters: 00:00 Disclosures: Why You Should Discount Everything I Say01:33 Why I'm Picking on Coupa (I'm Not Here to Bury It)03:54 Not Dead Yet: SaaS in the Agentic Age05:43 Taken Private: $8B, the Debt, and Peak Coupa06:59 Four Deals in 12 Months: A Confession With a Press Release13:28 Buying Back the Front Door: Tonkean vs Zip20:36 "Cloud Native Agentic Trade Network," Word by Word25:28 Debt, Markdowns, and the Hail Mary33:57 Teleporting to Tel Aviv: Dor Israeli on AI-First Architecture

In this episode of Algo Ego, I go solo for a long-overdue lecture on a thesis I've been building over the past several months: Exact Purchasing. The argument, simply, is that Peter Kralik's 1983 HBR matrix has run procurement for forty years, but it was never the right answer. It was the most procurement could afford to do with the labor it had. AI changes that. I walk through the four quadrants of Exact Purchasing (market risk, cost architecture, transaction capture, relationship governance), then turn the lens on the legacy procurement SaaS stack and call code red on suites built around a compromise we forgot was a compromise. I dig into the balance sheets and AI strategies of Coupa, Jaggaer, SAP Ariba, and Ivalua. No holds barred, no economic interest, no apologies. Dor Israeli joins mid-episode for a check on how AI employees change the data picture entirely. No champagne. No cava either.

In this episode of Algo Ego, Jason and Lisa take on leadership in the age of AI: not the abstract, Harvard-weekend version, but the real questions facing anyone who manages people, builds teams, or raises kids in a world where unlimited processing power is sitting right next to you. They debate whether AI kills leadership or demands more of it, why the liberal arts may be more relevant now than ever, what happens when entry-level classes shrink and the school of hard knocks loses its enrollment, and whether AI board members are as far-fetched as they sound. Lisa pushes back on ageism, champions the builder mentality, and draws on their family’s experience with military leadership training. Then Jason is joined by Dor Israeli, CTO of Gain, who describes what it’s actually like to lead a software team when one developer can ship 13 features in a day, and why decision fatigue, not code quality, is the new bottleneck. They explore the widening gap between senior and junior developers, why AI slop is already becoming a thing of the past, and how bringing along the average developer may be the hardest leadership challenge of all.

Everybody’s talking about AI layoffs. But the real question at our dinner table isn’t who’s losing jobs, it’s what all of this means for our kids. In this episode, I bring the conversation out of our house and onto the mic with the person who knows my blind spots better than anyone: my wife, business partner, and co-conspirator, Lisa Reisman. Together, we wrestle with some uncomfortable questions: Is traditional education still fit for purpose in an AI-driven world? Is college becoming a necessity, a luxury, or a liability? And how should parents actually think about preparing kids for a future that looks nothing like the one we grew up expecting? We talk about AI's role in the classroom, inversion thinking, career paths that won’t be easily automated, the risks of underemployment, and why helping kids find direction earlier matters more than ever. This isn’t a manifesto or a parenting playbook. It’s an honest, sometimes messy conversation about uncertainty, responsibility, and how to give our kids a real shot at fulfillment in the age of AI.

This week, I’m joined by my long-time sparring partner and business builder, Guy Stafford, to reflect on his 25+ years leading the wildly successful procurement firm, Proxima (acquired by Bain), and how those hard-won lessons apply to the age of AI. Guy pulls back the curtain on Proxima’s creation, from a $35 domain name (Buy.co.uk) in the mid-90s to navigating the dot-com crash, before dissecting his philosophy on mentorship: why he works in the shadows, the power of following up, and why the best advice comes from asking, "Who's done this before?" We then launch into a high-octane debate on the future of procurement, covering: The Proxima 2.0: How AI fundamentally changes the consulting model, forcing businesses to quickly automate tactical work to focus on strategic high-level interactions. The Black Box CPO: Why AI will make procurement about more than just savings, and how the micro-coaching capabilities of AI could offer live, tailored advice to category managers (like a fitness tracker for your professional life). The Race to Relevance: Guy shares a crucial warning for CPOs: the race isn't defined by industry, but by who in the organization (Finance, IT, or Procurement) effectively wields the new AI power, and what skills are needed to stay on top.

In this episode of Algo Ego, I sit down with Sam Kinney to revisit the rise of FreeMarkets and explore how its core ideas translate into today’s world of AI-driven market design. We unpack the creative auction formats that reshaped industrial sourcing, the cultural engine that powered the company’s talent, and how those lessons apply as AI begins to automate negotiation, supplier discovery, and cost modeling at massive scale. Sam also shares a forward-looking view of how AI agents might represent buyers and suppliers, how digital “part twins” could reshape engineering, and why rebuilding FreeMarkets today would look radically different — but still grounded in the same market principles that made it work 30 years ago.

In this episode of Algo Ego, I sit down with Stuart Loren — investor, former lawyer, and one of the sharpest voices on AI-driven economic change. Stuart and I talk about how he shifted from corporate law to institutional investing, and why themes like AI, energy supply, and social disruption now sit at the center of his work. We dig into Jevons’ Paradox and what 19th-century coal demand can teach us about today’s GPU-powered world — including why data centers may jump from 3% to 12% of U.S. electricity use. Stuart explains how this fuels a new global race for power infrastructure, why China is over-building on purpose, and why the West risks falling behind. We also cover his thesis on social disaffection, how AI may reshape white-collar careers, and what happens when tech giants move from software margins to owning physical assets like data centers and energy. Stuart shares what this means for investors, governments, and the future of cities like Chicago.

In this episode of Algo Ego, I sit down with Sam Kinney, co-founder of FreeMarkets — the company that pioneered online procurement auctions and transformed how global supply chains operate. Sam and I talk about how FreeMarkets began in the early ’90s — before Java, before Netscape — and how a handful of former McKinsey consultants turned a manual “ballroom auction” into one of the most influential B2B platforms of its time. We dive into the creative auction formats that shaped modern sourcing, from index bidding to net present value auctions, and the culture that fueled the company’s explosive growth (including the now-legendary “bag of bolts” interview test). Sam also shares lessons from FreeMarkets’ rise, what we learned about innovation and disruption, and how those insights apply to today’s world of AI-driven market design and the future of procurement.

In Episode 2 of Algo Ego, we feature Tom Beaty, founder of Insight Sourcing Group and creator of SpendHQ and Witness to War Foundation. Tom shares how he built multiple successful companies at the intersection of procurement, data, and technology—starting from a basement startup to a major acquisition by Accenture. We explore how he turned an internal analytics tool into a thriving SaaS business, and how his passion for history led to one of the largest veteran oral history archives in the U.S.

In Episode 1 of Algo Ego, we feature Bob Solomon, the original business architect of the Ariba Supplier Network. Bob is an expert on networks, marketplaces, and B2B. We trace the history of these models and dive into the origin story of the Ariba Supplier Network, then explore how they’ve since evolved through industry-specific offerings and verticalization post SAP Ariba. From there, we shift the conversation to the future of networks and marketplaces in the Age of AI. Our regular discussion with Dor Israeli (my resident AI guru and the closest thing we have to a modern Seinfeld character) covers the latest AI news, including Microsoft’s new models, and what it means when AI employees and agents start negotiating with each other instead of humans.