qado wins the EY AI Procurement Award 2026, judged by corporate procurement leaders

On 12 June, at the EY Supply Chain Days in Mannheim, qado received the EY Supply Chain Now AI Procurement Award 2026 in the "Operational Procurement Use Case" category.

The Award

Ernst & Young presents the award at its Supply Chain Days, open to providers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It was handed out for the first time in 2025, then to Crowdfox and Mercanis.

There are two categories, one strategic and one operational. qado won the Operational Use Case, framed as "From Shared Service to Smart Service: AI-Optimized Operational Procurement", which covers solutions that improve procurement in day-to-day operation. The Strategic Use Case, "Next-Level Strategic Procurement: AI-Enabled Market & Demand Intelligence", went to Tacto. Congratulations to the team.

The process

The winners were not chosen by EY but, independently of it, by a panel of procurement leaders from well-known companies, including executives from Sixt, Continental, Boehringer Ingelheim and Bayer. In assessment sessions with interviews, these experts evaluated the software itself, not a presentation about it. The questions came from people who run procurement organisations at corporate scale and know from experience where procurement software hits its limits in day-to-day operation.

Here you can watch the video we entered into the competition:

Why this one matters to us

At the core of our platform is the automated monitoring of contract terms. qado checks purchase orders, order confirmations, invoices and goods receipts against existing contracts and identifies in real time where negotiated discounts, index adjustments or penalty clauses are not being enforced. AI agents flag it automatically when savings go unused or a favourable moment for renegotiation arises.

How unremarkable such cases look in practice is best shown by an example from a customer project. A contractually agreed price indexation clause had never been applied. The index moved, the invoices stayed at the old price. Because no individual invoice looked wrong, nobody noticed for two years. Cost: roughly 500,000 euros. Across all our customers, qado recovers 2 to 4 % of procurement spend, without anyone having to renegotiate.

That the assessment came from procurement leaders at large corporations, and not from a jury of technology experts alone, is the most valuable part of this award for us. These are exactly the people we build the product for.

"In consulting, I watched teams comb through contracts by hand for months to find money that had been lost. Having a panel of corporate procurement leaders examine our software and recognise it for exactly that confirms what we work on every day: every negotiated euro should actually arrive in the P&L. In companies under financial pressure in particular, every percentage point saved in procurement counts." – Patrick Gundlach, Co-Founder, qado

Two weeks later came a second verdict, from a very different audience: at Procurement Summit in Hamburg, the visitors voted qado into first place in the Startup Award 2026. You can read how that went here.

Thanks to EY and to the panel. And to our customers, who trust us with their contracts and their data.