Keynote | Where Nordic companies are sourcing, investing and expanding — what the data is actually saying

Despite geopolitical turmoil and record-high uncertainty, Nordic companies continue to perform internationally — but the playbook is being rewritten in real time. Customer markets are rebalancing, supplier geographies are being rewired, and capital is moving alongside contracts.

Lena Sellgren, Chief Economist and Head of Research at Business Sweden, opens CPO Outlook 2026 with the view from outside in. Working with her counterparts at the Nordic trade and investment agencies, she pulls together supplier network analyses, business climate surveys of thousands of C-level decision-makers across thirty-plus markets, foreign direct investment trends, and a new set of trade flow simulations released in the summer — mapping where Nordic companies are sourcing, investing and expanding over the next three years, and where the assumptions in many strategy decks no longer match the data. It sets the frame for the day. The same picture also informs where Nordic companies build, expand and invest — conversations procurement is often pulled into late.

• Where Nordic export markets are pulling, holding and contracting — and what that means for the suppliers and markets behind your business case
• How the rebalancing away from China and the US is unfolding across Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland — in supplier flows, production footprints and foreign direct investment
• Why free trade agreements have moved from policy footnote to sourcing and investment variable in the past eighteen months
• What the latest Nordic data on sustainability across smaller suppliers signals for the next compliance, competitiveness and capital-allocation wave

Keynote | Beyond Tier 1 — turning multi-tier visibility into decisions that actually get made

Most procurement teams now have access to more risk data than they can act on. The harder question isn't whether you can see the risk — it's who in the organisation is empowered to do something about it, on what timeline, and with what authority. This session moves past dashboards into the operational reality of multi-tier risk.

• How leading Nordic organisations are operationalising sub-tier risk monitoring — not just collecting it
• What it takes to translate AI-driven media scanning and supplier signals into procurement action
• Who owns sub-tier accountability when risk crosses procurement, sustainability, legal and operations
• Where CSDDD and CSRD are forcing change that was already needed for commercial reasons

Keynote | From Autonomous Pilots to Production — what actually changes when AI runs in source-to-pay

The promise of agentic procurement has been on every slide for two years. This session is about what happens after the pilot: the integration debt, the change management, the policy guardrails, and the uncomfortable conversations about what people will and won't do anymore. A grounded look at AI in S2P from organisations past the demo phase.

• What's working in real Nordic deployments of autonomous sourcing, contracting and spend control
• How to design guardrails that allow speed without losing audit trail or commercial judgement
• Where AI adds value across the spend management lifecycle — and where it still doesn't
• How procurement teams adapt roles and capabilities when execution shifts to agents

Panel | What behavioral science is teaching us about leading procurement through real change

Procurement leaders are asked to deliver razor-sharp execution under cost and resilience pressure while simultaneously building a function fit for what comes next. Both clocks at maximum, same team, same week. Most playbooks treat this as a strategy problem. It's a people problem — and the disciplines that actually study how people decide under pressure have a lot to say about why some transformations land and others quietly stall.

This panel brings three lenses on the same question. A behavioral scientist who studies how people decide under uncertainty. A change leader who has spent years embedding those frameworks inside large Nordic organisations. And a senior procurement leader running a multi-year sourcing transformation across a global function. What actually changes leader behavior, team behavior, and stakeholder behavior — and which of the tools procurement reaches for first are the ones that work last.

• Why most procurement transformations underestimate the human cost — and which behavioral mechanisms (loss aversion, status quo bias, social proof, peak-end) are the real friction
• How leaders close the gap between what they tell themselves about a change and what the team is actually experiencing
• What "performing while transforming" looks like in a function where neither clock will pause for the other — and what gets starved when leaders pretend otherwise
• Which interventions move behavior measurably, and which are theatre dressed as strategy

Lab Recap | What twelve labs surfaced — patterns, disagreements, and what comes back to the office on Monday

Across twelve peer labs on Day 1, twelve different rooms tackled the questions Nordic procurement is actually trying to answer in 2026 — AI mandate, KPI redesign, the human boundary on automation, the sustainability squeeze, the talent question, change leadership when nothing stays still. Each lab generated a takeaway you can write down. This session pulls the threads together.

Where did the rooms converge? Where did they openly disagree? Which labs ended with a clearer answer than they started, and which left the question sharper than the answer? A recap led by EBG together with the moderators who held the floor — built to give every participant the takeaways from the eleven labs they didn't sit in.

• The patterns that recurred across multiple labs — and what they signal about the year ahead
• The disagreements that wouldn't resolve — where peers genuinely see this differently
• The takeaways most labs converged on, written so they can land on a leadership meeting agenda
• What's worth carrying into 2027 — and what was a 2026 conversation only

Keynote | Orchestration before intelligence — what it takes to make AI in procurement actually deliver

Most AI pilots in procurement don't fail because the AI is weak. They fail because the workflows around it are fragmented, the data is inconsistent, and the policy guardrails were never built. Agentic AI promises a step change in how procurement teams operate — autonomous workflows across sourcing, contracting, supplier management — but it only works on top of a structured, governed foundation. Without orchestration, intelligence has nothing reliable to act on.

This keynote unpacks what the leading procurement organisations are doing differently. How they design intake, routing, approvals and data flow as one connected system before layering AI on top. Where the human-agent operating model actually lands in practice. And why the organisations seeing the strongest returns from AI investment are the ones that did the unglamorous orchestration work first.

• What "orchestration maturity" looks like in practice — and how to assess where your function sits today
• How to design the human-agent operating model so AI autonomy and human oversight are calibrated, not improvised
• Where agentic AI is delivering measurable outcomes across source-to-pay — and where it's still proof-of-concept
• What separates the procurement organisations earning real ROI on AI from those still piloting after eighteen months

Keynote | Inside a procurement function being rewired — what digital core execution actually demands

Most transformation stories are told after the fact, polished for stage. This one is being told from inside the work. A major Nordic industrial company is in the middle of one of the most consequential transitions in the region's recent memory — supplier networks being rewired, the function moving from buyer to strategic partner, digital core capability being built while quarterly delivery pressure does not pause. The function isn't being modernised in theory. It's being executed against, every quarter, while the rest of the business is in flight.

This keynote brings the view from a leader who has held both ends of that line — running global procurement strategy, and now leading digital core strategy execution. The honest version of what it takes to embed digital and data capability inside a procurement function while the business it serves is changing underneath. Where the strategy decks meet the calendar, and what gets cut when both can't survive the week.

• How procurement priorities are actually being set when the parent business is mid-transition — and which ones don't survive contact with the quarter
• What digital core execution means in practice for a procurement function: the integration debt, the data foundation, the change-management cost
• Where AI and automation are delivering measurable change in a heavy direct-spend environment — and where the demo doesn't survive production
• What a leader running this work wishes they had known eighteen months ago about pace, sequencing and team capacity

Panel + room discussion | Redesigning procurement roles for the AI era — and what the 4+ hours expectation actually means

A practitioner-led conversation on what AI does to procurement teams in practice — not the headline, the reality. How roles change. What skills become essential. What gets harder before it gets easier. The session opens with the most striking number from the Xperience 2026 survey: today around 15% of Nordic procurement professionals save four or more hours per week from AI; in two years, 67% expect to. That is the largest single expectation curve the function has ever published about itself — and a planning assumption many CPOs are quietly building into their operating models.

The panel sets up the question. A live room discussion — at tables, with polling — surfaces where each participant's organisation actually sits on the curve, what's working and what's not, and what the operating model needs to do whether or not the 67% lands. The panel then closes the loop with what they see across their own organisations.

• How procurement roles are actually being redesigned around AI capability — and what that means for hiring profiles and career paths
• Which competences sit at the centre of the role now, and which legacy skills still matter most
• Where AI is genuinely saving hours today — the lived examples, not the slide-ware — and what separates the use cases that land from the ones that disappoint
• How to plan capacity for both outcomes: the productivity gain that lands in two years, and the one that doesn't

Closing Keynote | What the room agreed on, what it didn't, and what the rest of 2026 demands

A closing reflection drawing together two days of conversation across the keynotes, twelve peer labs, theme discussions, workshops, and the awarding of the first Nordic CPO of the Year. Where the room found rough consensus — and where it openly disagreed. What to bring back into the next leadership meeting. What to put on the personal development list before year-end. And the one question every CPO in the room should be able to answer differently a year from now than they could on Wednesday morning.