The study followed a one-hour interview guide in six sections: sponsorship and organizational health; financial and value pressures; center-of-excellence structure, usage and adoption; continuity and long-term success; mission-critical use cases and strategic outcomes; and final reflections and future intentions. A revised version added questions on staffing, operating model and alternative providers, and on whether process insight is a prerequisite for AI-driven automation.

Between late October 2025 and late January 2026, PP&A conducted eighteen interviews with customer-side leaders: center-of-excellence and process analytics leads, a global process owner, transformation and automation leaders, and executives in finance, procurement, supply chain, internal audit and internal controls. Their organizations spanned financial services, life sciences, consumer goods and retail, manufacturing and distribution, shipping, energy and software, across Europe, North America and Latin America. Tenure on the platform ranged from about eighteen months to more than a decade. PP&A captured every call in a structured notes workbook, updated in six versions as fieldwork progressed, and delivered it as an interview-by-interview findings record organized by the six themes.

The workbook gave the client first-hand evidence from eighteen accounts ahead of its renewal conversations.

Sponsorship set the trajectory. Where a chief executive or senior business owner drove the program, ownership passed to the business and spending stopped needing justification: one distribution business reached a 20 percent labor-efficiency gain in its first year and 40 percent by year four. Where no executive champion existed, use stayed tactical; one customer had run the platform project by project for five years without an enterprise agreement. Sponsor turnover and managers uneasy with the transparency the platform creates were recurring threats.

Value was real but only partly captured. Customers measured return in working capital, cash leakage, cycle time and freed capacity, and one procure-to-pay organization raised on-time supplier payments from 15 to 70 percent in two years. Yet five interviewees put utilization or value capture at 20 to 40 percent of what the platform could deliver. Several stressed that identified savings become real only when the business changes processes or staffing.

Price was the pressure point. Fourteen of the eighteen called the platform expensive or named cost as a concern, and three objected to licensing changes that made scaling harder to predict or justify. Customers saw the main competitive threats in lower-cost rivals replicating core features and in transactional systems adding their own AI. Account teams and value engineers earned praise for responsiveness and process expertise, while staff rotation and feature selling that bypassed a customer's center of excellence strained some relationships.

Renewal intent was mostly positive but conditional. Three customers had recently renewed or committed to multi-year terms, and two business units at another cancelled a planned move to a rival because of the platform's automation features. Others signaled risk: one planned to drop lower-return use cases and shrink its footprint at the next renewal, and another expected its renewal price to force a rethink.

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