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The New York Knicks won their first NBA championship in 53 years, and their ticker-tape parade kicks off in Battery Park this morning.
As a New York company, we're not pretending to be objective about this.
But the way that the team won is worth paying attention to.
The easy story is the comebacks. Down 29 in Game 4. Down 16 in Game 5. The resilience. The shot-making. The drama. But the more interesting story is what happened long before the Finals.
The San Antonio Spurs had Victor Wembanyama. A generational talent and the kind of player every franchise dreams of building around. If you were starting a team from scratch, he's probably the first name on the board.
The Knicks had something different.
Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, and Mikal Bridges won an NCAA championship together at Villanova in 2016. A decade later, they helped bring a title back to New York. By the time they reached the Finals, they'd spent years building a shared understanding of how each other played. They'd run the same actions together thousands of times. When pressure mounted, they didn't need to stop and figure things out. Coordination had become automatic.
People call that chemistry.
We think there's a better way to describe it: shared context.
What Brunson, Hart, and Bridges had wasn't just friendship. It was a decade of accumulated reps. They'd internalized each other's tendencies so thoroughly that coordination became second nature. They could stop thinking about it and focus on execution. So while the Spurs had the most exciting individual talent in basketball, the Knicks had a connected core. And this year, the connected core won.
That's the part that feels surprisingly relevant to what's happening in procurement technology right now.
Every major software category eventually becomes obsessed with capability, and procurement is there now.
Every week seems to bring another announcement about a more autonomous agent, a more advanced model, or a new AI feature capable of handling increasingly complex tasks. The conversation is dominated by what individual agents can do.
The largest procurement platforms are making a similar bet. Better sourcing. Better analytics. Better invoice processing. Better AI. The assumption is that if every capability gets stronger, the overall system gets stronger too.
In practice, that's rarely where the friction lives.
Procurement doesn't happen inside a single workflow. A supplier update affects a purchase order. A purchase order affects operations. Operations affects finance. An invoice discrepancy creates downstream work across multiple teams. The challenge isn't whether an individual task can be completed. It's whether information moves cleanly between all of them.
That's why Gartner predicts that more than 40% of AI agent projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to factors including escalating costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk controls. The problem isn't that agents can't perform useful work. The problem is that many organizations are deploying capabilities without solving coordination.
The lesson from the Knicks is straightforward: capability matters, but coordination determines how much value that capability actually creates.
One of the reasons the Villanova story resonated so strongly throughout the Knicks' run is that people instinctively understand the value of familiarity.
But familiarity isn't the same thing as friendship.
Brunson, Hart, and Bridges weren't successful because they liked each other. They were successful because they'd run the same play a thousand times. Shared experience became shared context, and shared context is what let them play fast.
That's true in procurement too.
Most procurement teams don't have a knowledge problem. They have a coordination problem.
A supplier updates a lead time by email. A buyer adjusts a purchase order. Operations needs visibility into the change. An invoice arrives with different quantities than expected. None of those activities are particularly complicated on their own. The complexity comes from keeping information moving between them.
Context gets trapped in inboxes. Teams work from different versions of the truth. Exceptions surface later than they should. People spend time chasing information that already exists somewhere else.
McKinsey's 2025 State of AI research found that 23% of organizations are already scaling AI agents in at least one business function. The more interesting question isn't how many agents companies deploy. It's how effectively those agents work together. An organization with ten disconnected agents often ends up in the same place as a basketball team with five talented players who have never played together.
At Didero, we think that's where the industry is getting distracted.
Everyone is looking for the next Wembanyama: the most impressive demo, the most advanced model, the most autonomous agent.
We're betting on the Knicks.
At Didero, we've spent the last few years making a different bet.
While much of the market has focused on building increasingly capable individual agents, we've focused on building Systems of Agents. Not a collection of disconnected capabilities, but a connected system where sourcing agents, purchasing agents, AP agents, supplier communication agents, and exception-management agents share context across the entire source-to-pay process.
A sourcing decision should inform supplier management. A supplier conversation should inform purchasing. A purchasing decision should inform accounts payable. Context created in one workflow should be available everywhere else it's needed.
The value doesn't come from any single agent. It comes from orchestration.
In basketball terms, that's what made the Villanova core so powerful. Brunson didn't need to explain the play. Hart and Bridges already knew it. Years of shared experience meant they could focus on execution instead of coordination.
The same principle applies to AI. When agents share context and memory, work moves faster. Decisions improve. Exceptions get handled earlier. Teams spend less time chasing information and more time acting on it.
The next generation of procurement technology won't be defined by how many individual tasks it can automate. It will be defined by how effectively information, decisions, and work move across an organization.
The Knicks didn't win because they found one player who could do everything. They won because they built a system where talented specialists could operate with less friction, greater trust, and a shared understanding of what needed to happen next.
That's what shared context creates. And increasingly, that's what AI should create too.
So while everyone else is looking to draft the next Wemby, we’re building the ‘Nova Knicks at Didero.
