Geopolitical shocks are forcing companies to rethink procurement intelligence: Claight CEO

The pandemic, Russia-Ukraine war, Red Sea disruptions and shifting US tariff policies have squeezed the time companies have to make sourcing decisions. Procurement teams are increasingly looking for forward-looking intelligence on prices, suppliers and landed costs rather than relying on periodic market reports. Claight, a market research and procurement intelligence company, provides services including cost modelling, supplier intelligence, commodity price forecasting and trade analytics. Its procurement offering includes cost analysis, supplier data, price trends and forecasting. In an interaction with ET Online, Vishal Ranjan, the company's founder and CEO, spoke about how geopolitical uncertainty is changing procurement, the role of AI in sourcing decisions and where the company sees its biggest growth opportunities globally. Edited excerpts:

ET: How has demand for procurement intelligence changed amid geopolitical tensions, tariff uncertainty and supply-chain disruptions?

Vishal Ranjan (VR): The demand for procurement intelligence has fundamentally changed in character, not just in volume. When we founded Claight in 2019, most enterprises treated procurement intelligence as a periodic, backward-looking exercise: commission a report, review it quarterly, act on it eventually. That model has collapsed.


The sequence of shocks since 2020, including the pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Red Sea disruptions and the current volatile tariff environment driven by US trade policy reversals, has compressed decision timelines to a degree that no annual or even quarterly research cycle can accommodate. A chief procurement officer (CPO) cannot afford to wait six weeks for a commodity price outlook when freight rates and raw material costs are moving daily.

Companies are no longer asking, “what happened to the price of a key input last quarter?” They are asking, “What will happen to our total landed cost under three tariff scenarios over the next six months, and which supplier network gives us the most resilience?” That requires a fundamentally different kind of intelligence capability.

ET: What market gap is Claight addressing, and how does it differentiate itself from traditional intelligence providers?

VR: The market gap Claight is addressing is closing the gap between data and decisions. The legacy market research industry excels at producing voluminous reports, while procurement teams are expected to make fast, confident decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty. The report has not kept pace with the decision.

Claight sits at the intersection of domain expertise and technology. We combine 200+ domain experts and analysts across six countries with proprietary datasets built over six years: 18,000+ research reports, 1,000+ commodity price series and global trade flow data across 30+ countries, all feeding an intelligence layer that synthesises these into actionable outputs in hours rather than weeks.

ET: How is AI reshaping procurement decision-making for large companies and enterprises?

VR: AI is reshaping procurement decision-making in three structural ways. The first is the shift from descriptive to predictive intelligence. AI-powered forecasting models can analyse historical purchasing patterns, live market signals, geopolitical indicators and macroeconomic data to generate forward-looking cost scenarios.

The second is the automation of high-volume, low-value procurement activity. Indirect procurement in large enterprises generates thousands of low-value transactions every month. AI can classify, route and process these transactions automatically, freeing procurement professionals to focus on strategic sourcing, supplier relationships and risk management.

The third is supplier intelligence at scale. AI can continuously monitor the financial health, geopolitical exposure, ESG compliance posture and delivery reliability of suppliers and flag emerging risks such as concentration risk, single-source dependency and regulatory non-compliance before they become operational crises.

ET: What sectors are seeing the fastest adoption of procurement intelligence platforms, and why?

VR: The sectors seeing the fastest adoption are those where raw material costs represent a significant share of total product cost, supply chains are globally distributed and pricing volatility has been acute over the past three to four years.

The verticals at the forefront are chemicals and advanced materials, food and beverage, particularly FMCG companies managing multi-ingredient formulations, healthcare and pharmaceutical procurement, and manufacturing and packaging.

In chemicals, commodity price swings, concentrated feedstock sources and complex regulatory environments have made real-time procurement intelligence increasingly important. In food and beverage, volatility in sunflower oil, palm oil and sugar has exposed the fragility of single-source procurement strategies.

API supply chains in healthcare and pharmaceuticals remain concentrated in a small number of geographies, while manufacturing and packaging companies are accelerating China+1 diversification. Enterprises restructuring their supply base need precise total landed-cost comparisons across alternative sourcing geographies.

ET: Can you share examples of measurable business impact delivered to clients?

VR: Yes, though I will speak at the aggregate level due to client confidentiality. The clearest example came during the US tariff shifts, when sourcing economics changed overnight. China had long been the cheapest source for many categories, but once the new duties were loaded in, that was no longer true. Using our landed-cost tool, clients found that alternative geographies were coming in up to 20-25% lower than China on a delivered, DDP basis at that point.

We extended the same logic into our solution, Procure360, which draws on import-export data across 60-plus countries to surface alternative suppliers and benchmark what competitors actually pay. Underneath both sits our should-cost capability, built on 400-plus category cost models, so a buyer can challenge a quoted price against a transparent cost build-up rather than negotiate blind.

The other measurable shift is speed. Intelligence that once meant a multi-week commissioned study is now available in a fraction of that time. For a category manager facing a price spike or supply disruption, that compression of time-to-insight is itself the impact.

ET: What is your growth roadmap, and where do you see the biggest opportunities for Claight globally over the next 3-5 years?

VR: Our ambition is to evolve from a research and consulting organisation into a globally recognised intelligence and decision-support platform. We have grown at over 40% annually since inception, entirely without external funding.

In the near term, the largest opportunity is helping mid-market enterprises access the quality of procurement and market intelligence that was previously available only to organisations with substantial internal research budgets. We see strong demand across manufacturing, chemicals and healthcare sectors, particularly in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

North America remains our largest revenue market. The Middle East and GCC region represents a high-growth opportunity as governments and sovereign investment entities build procurement and strategic intelligence capabilities in support of economic diversification.

In the three-to-five-year horizon, I believe the most important competitive position will belong to organisations that own the intelligence layer between raw market data and enterprise decisions. That is precisely where Claight is building: proprietary data, deep domain expertise and global delivery infrastructure.