Technology entrepreneur Lior Delgo examines how procurement leaders can partner with AI to not only drive more value for the business but also enhance their career development.
AI has been democratised so quickly, already used in so many areas of our lives (both my parents and my kids adopted it at the same time, but that’s a story for another day!). It’s also become a commodity.
GenAI is everywhere these days, powering search engines, enterprise tools, content creation, media, education, healthcare, finance, software development, legal services and even art. It touches nearly every industry and application.
However, just because GenAI is everywhere, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always welcome, or indeed working well, everywhere.
Corporate procurement is a notable exception. Procurement is unique because it’s a complex, intensive process whose decisions not only impact the bottom line but can also determine success.
Enhancing procurement with AI helps companies identify their best-fit suppliers, even in historically hard-to-procure spend areas that are complex and high-value. Because these areas have also been the hardest for machines to understand, they’ve been the most challenging to automate and optimise, relying exclusively on humans to handle. At last, that’s changing.
Procurement specialists no longer need to spend hours or days writing long, detailed briefs that cover every possible sourcing scenario. Now, they can ‘partner’ with an AI agent, trained over many years by procurement experts, to receive a personalised sourcing journey with instant access to all the information and insights they need. This is game-changing.
No matter the company, bidding for complex services requires teams to articulate their needs through lengthy RFPs. The complexity and detail of these documents make it difficult to fairly and accurately evaluate and compare vendors’ solutions, proposals, pricing and specific requirements such as diversity, sustainability and cultural fit.
Using AI agents to increase your impact across the business
Doing this work repeatedly, at scale, is a big ask for procurement teams. That’s why being able to actually ‘converse’ about every aspect of a brief with systems that have infinite amounts of patience, vast recall and meticulous attention to detail is a real step change.
Effectively, these systems act as informed colleagues who read all the information for you, synthesising it in seconds to give fast answers, and generating ideal responses to the market that are compliant with all your company policies.
Procurement teams can now convey what specialists call ‘complex intent’ at different stages in the sourcing journey using natural language alone. For example, modern autonomous sourcing agents help users to source, compare and optimise the entire procurement process (and are now in place with some of the world’s largest enterprises).
Adobe’s Chief Strategy Officer and closely followed AI trend watcher Scott Belsky has been writing about how AI is starting to help businesses do just this. As he writes, “Rather than hire out teams of specialists for every function, companies will have the opportunity to purchase AI capabilities – often in the form of agent-based tools or ‘AI teammates’ – that (or is it who?) automate parts of a process or entire workflows within individual functions.”
Having such a partner not only saves considerable time but also helps specialists achieve much better outcomes than trying to do all of this on their own. Why? Because dedicated AI- teammates such as our autonomous procurement solution, for instance, built natively for nearly a decade, can draw on massive bodies of accumulated knowledge and intelligence from millions of buyer and seller transactions.
Crucially, the ultimate decision-making remains with the carbon and not silicon-based side of the partnership. Whether or not we are truly heading for Gartner’s vision of a world where machines increasingly buy from machines, and where, by as soon as 2030, 15-20 percent of your revenue will come from selling directly to such non-human customers, I believe a large part of B2B procurement will increasingly be driven and orchestrated by human experts working in productive partnerships with AI agents.
Adopt the power of AI to reap the benefits
By partnering with this new class of AI agents, buyers will not only work smarter, but they’ll also enhance their reputation across the enterprise. Implementing data-driven processes that identify the best providers, proposals and outcomes will lead to improved business metrics, enabling procurement to add more strategic value and help drive new growth.
As the effectiveness of these processes becomes more visible, increasing numbers of stakeholders, including those who typically avoid procurement, will become engaged, bringing more spend under management.
However, it’s important to emphasise that unlike other areas, in complex sourcing we’re not yet talking about machine-to-machine-only transactions. Complex purchasing decisions always involve relationships; buyers and sellers need to feel confident and trust each other.
Partnering with AI automates low-value repetitive, manual tasks, allowing you to focus on more strategic work such as supplier collaboration, scenario planning and becoming a true partner to the business. Relationships (internal and external) will always be crucial in procurement, and these will continue to be managed and led by people, while AI agents do the background work.
Be bold and stand out from the crowd
So, my advice to procurement professionals is this: just as you continually develop and nurture your partnerships with colleagues, focus on how to best partner with AI.
Consider the types of guidance, instructions and prompts you can develop to unleash AI’s potential within your organisation. Strive to create an impact that is unparalleled and uniquely tailored to you, your company, your creativity and your proprietary data.
This approach is both the most creative and value-adding strategy you can adopt for using AI agents to help better manage all your company spend, as well as for your personal career development, marking you out as a forward-thinking procurement leader who wants to move the profession from tactical back-office function to strategic driver of growth at the heart of the business.
The author is Co-Founder and President of Globality, the market leader in next-generation AI-driven autonomous sourcing. An entrepreneur with a proven record of building disruptive technology and new business models, Delgo was previously a leader of Microsoft’s Xbox division. He also holds numerous technology patents.
