Early customers cut RFQ cycles from two weeks to 15 minutes; 3,300+ items processed in the first two months.
LightSource, an operating system for direct materials sourcing for enterprise procurement, announced the launch of LightSource AI Workforce, five new capabilities that eliminate the manual work of sourcing in stages where time is spent most: data analytics, item ingestion, RFQ’s, and supplier activation. Now procurement teams can instead focus on strategic work, bringing products to market faster at lower cost.
“The direct procurement professional has been under-tooled for decades,” said Spencer Penn, CEO and Co-Founder of LightSource.
More than 20 years after the first sourcing software, only 18% of procurement teams use a professional sourcing tool. LightSource is built for the 82% left behind, an AI-native operating system for direct materials sourcing that connects engineering, procurement, and suppliers from first concept to award and gives AI the ability to act, not just advise.
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“The direct procurement professional has been under-tooled for decades,” said Spencer Penn, CEO and Co-Founder of LightSource. “We built LightSource to fix that. These new capabilities give CPOs the ability to act, not just advise, across the full sourcing cycle.”
LightSource AI Workforce includes five new capabilities:
Ask LightSource: Get instant answers without digging through spreadsheets. Ask in plain English about spend, suppliers, pipeline, or sourcing history. Answers come grounded in data, standardizing reporting and providing teams with actionable insights.
Item Ingestion & Data Clean Up: Turn any file into clean item data. Drop in drawings, spreadsheets, PDFs, and images. LightSource extracts and enhances new and existing item properties and merges data to create consistency across items and BOMS with relationships intact.
RFX Setup: Go from two weeks to 15 minutes. Leveraging AI, build quote format templates to create a standardized structure that increases efficiency, cuts formatting time, and becomes reusable across teams for future RFX events.
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Supplier Activation: Suppliers respond without the chase. Questions get answered instantly, deadline reminders go out without lifting a finger, and quotes come in clean no matter what format suppliers submit in.
Award Optimization: Award with confidence. Users describe what they need in plain language. Set custom constraints, from cost to location to lead times, then optimize every scenario with outputs ready for negotiation and award.
“Every sourcing cycle, supplier interaction, and award decision makes the system sharper,” said Idan Mintz, CTO and Co-Founder of LightSource. “That compounding context is the difference between a tool that assists and one that changes how a team works.”
With 3,300+ items processed and 250+ quote formats created in the first two months, LightSource AI Workforce is live and built on an architecture that separates AI reasoning from data operations. The platform requires user approval before anything executes, creating a meaningful distinction for teams who have been burned by AI that fabricates figures.
