Maher Smith is an IT Procurement Manager at mycar (Continental AG), known for combining commercial rigour with genuine technical fluency to deliver measurable outcomes across SaaS, cloud, network, and digital platforms. His approach to procurement is grounded in a practical belief: the strongest commercial results come from understanding the technology well enough to challenge assumptions, understanding commercials with high clarity, with de-risk implementation, and negotiating outcomes tied to real value and strategic alignment.

Maher’s career began in finance, progressing through accounting and Finance Manager roles, where he developed a disciplined foundation in cost drivers, governance, and decision support for executives. That grounding now underpins his procurement style, commercially exacting, analytically driven, and focused on translating complex technology decisions into clear business trade-offs.

Across his procurement career, Maher has led high-impact sourcing and negotiation programs, including savings on $4.8M SaaS renegotiation and more than $3.1M in savings through network transformation initiatives. He is particularly recognised for going beyond vendor claims and marketing narratives, testing, validating, and stress-checking technology choices to ensure contracts align with operational reality. In one recent engagement, this hands-on diligence enabled him to challenge network hardware specifications and avoid approximately $300K in unnecessary cost, while strengthening implementation confidence for stakeholders.

A defining feature of Maher’s work is his commitment to “learning by building.” He maintains a personal homelab hypervisor where he prototypes enterprise patterns—security monitoring (SIEM), infrastructure-as-code, and workflow automation—so he can interrogate architecture choices with credibility and translate technical nuance into procurement levers. This capability has supported him in shaping technology strategy with senior leaders, including influencing data platform direction and authoring technical requirements when internal bandwidth or specialist expertise was limited.

Maher is currently focused on the fast-emerging AI/ML procurement landscape, building practical understanding of the end-to-end stack—from infrastructure economics through deployment models, orchestration, governance, and adoption. As an active AI practitioner, he brings a balanced perspective on what is technically possible versus what is operationally sustainable, and what procurement teams must do to contract for both innovation and control.