# Marcus Delgado, Director of Procurement at Tenex Industrial (320 employees, plastics components mfg) — read of Procurement AI, May 8 2026

> 14 years in procurement and supply chain, currently managing 6 category managers and a vendor pool of about 400 active suppliers. We're on Coupa for PO routing but everything upstream is still spreadsheets and tribal knowledge.

## How I got here

Searched "vendor scoring software procurement mid-market" on a Tuesday afternoon while I was waiting on a callback from our steel supplier. This showed up on page one, below two Coupa articles and an Ariba landing page I've already ruled out twice. Clicked it mostly because the URL wasn't a 14-word slug and the meta description didn't say "end-to-end."

## What I clicked first

The hero subhead: "Automated vendor selection, contract negotiation, and cost optimization in minutes instead of weeks." The "minutes instead of weeks" line is either completely true and worth $400k to me personally, or it's the most dishonest sentence on the page. I kept reading to find out which.

## Where I paused

"Negotiate from data, not experience." That stopped me. Someone on their team actually has an opinion about procurement. Most vendors in this space are too scared to say anything that sounds like it challenges a buyer's ego. This line implies that my current negotiation approach, which is heavy on relationship and gut feel, is costing me money. They're probably right. I sat with that for a second.

## What I distrusted

The stat block: "70% Less procurement time / 30% Average cost savings / 60 Days to ROI." No source. No sample size. No "in a study of X customers." It's just floating there like it came down from the mountain. And then immediately below it: "Average savings: $200k-$800k per year." That range is so wide it tells me nothing. A $200k outcome and an $800k outcome are completely different products in terms of who they're for and how complex the implementation is.

Also, the footer credit: "Built by Wishdeal Studio." I have no idea what Wishdeal Studio is, and that phrasing makes this feel like a feature built inside a design agency portfolio rather than a standalone company with a support team I can call at 7am when our audit is tomorrow. That might be unfair, but that's what the page communicated to me.

No customer logos anywhere in the text I saw. No "trusted by" section. Nothing that says another company with a procurement team like mine put this in front of their CFO and kept it running 18 months later.

## What would convince me

One real case study. Not a testimonial quote. A case study. Company size, industry, what tool they replaced or layered this over, what the vendor pool looked like before, what happened to their tail spend or compliance rate after 6 months. I don't need the company name if they want to anonymize it. I need the shape of the problem they had and whether it matches mine. If it's a 1,200-person retail team that already had a dedicated procurement analyst and a $2M Ariba contract, that's not me. If it's a 300-person manufacturer running Sage and Google Sheets, I'm picking up the phone.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The vendor scoring feature -- does it pull in external data (like D&B or a supplier risk feed) or is it only scoring based on what I upload from my own history? Because half my newer vendors have almost no transaction history with us yet.

2. "Contract Optimization -- Generate market-competitive contracts" -- what's the benchmark here? Is this against publicly available contract data, your own customer aggregate data, or is this just flagging non-standard clauses against a template? Those are three very different things.

3. What does implementation actually look like for a team our size? Do we need an IT resource? Do you assign a success person or is it a Loom library and a Slack channel?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The "negotiate from data, not experience" line is doing a lot of work and I respect it, but the stat block and the "Wishdeal Studio" attribution both made me hesitate at the wrong moments. I'm not clicking Start Free Trial without knowing what I'm actually trialing.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-08. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*