For all the discussion surrounding AI, one question seems to sit behind most conversations: What will happen to people?
My answer is simple: I don’t believe AI is replacing procurement professionals. I believe it is changing how and where their expertise is applied.
That distinction matters.
Much of the AI conversation is focused on functionality. What AI can do. What it can automate. How quickly it can process and analyze information. Those are important advancements. But what happens when AI removes the administrative burden from procurement professionals?
If AI is handling the repetitive, time-consuming work. The manual research. The first-pass analysis. The drafting, structuring, and information gathering that occupies so much of a professional’s day.
What then?
For me, that is where the real conversation begins.
Significant investment is being directed towards AI solutions, whether as standalone tools or intelligent functionality embedded within existing technologies. We are already seeing those investments reshape many of the administrative and repetitive activities that consume organizational time today.
Even in my own role, AI has dramatically improved the speed at which I can complete certain tasks. Bringing together thoughts, strategies, and unstructured ideas into clear communications now takes a fraction of the time it once did. Research that previously required hours of trawling through multiple sources can now be significantly accelerated through effective prompting and AI-supported analysis.
Those gains are meaningful. But I do not think efficiency is the most important opportunity. The bigger question is what happens with the time that gets released.
When administrative effort is reduced, procurement professionals gain more time to solve problems, engage stakeholders, make decisions, and drive outcomes.
In many respects, AI has the potential to increase the importance of human contribution by removing some of the activities that prevent people from focusing on higher-value work. And that matters because the activities AI is freeing people from were never the source of procurement’s value in the first place.
AI can improve the work. It cannot replace the expertise.
Within procurement, there are already several areas where AI is delivering tangible value. Spend analysis, supplier research, market insight generation, and contract leakage reporting are all areas where AI can rapidly process large volumes of information and give teams a stronger foundation for decision-making.
It can help organizations understand spending patterns faster, identify opportunities sooner, and reduce the time required to develop sourcing strategies and specifications.
Risk management is another area with significant potential. Tools are emerging that can analyze contracts, identify areas of concern and monitor supply chain risks in real time. Given the scale of disruption organizations have faced in recent years, that ability to identify operational and geopolitical risks quickly is increasingly valuable.
But access to information is not the same as achieving an outcome.
AI can help surface information. AI can accelerate analysis. AI can support decision-making. But information alone does not create commercial impact.
People do.
That is why I believe the replacement narrative is too simplistic. AI may change the work that procurement professionals do, but the value of procurement has never come from task completion alone. It comes from applying judgment, context and commercial understanding to complex situations.
Why expertise remains the differentiator
One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding AI is the assumption that it is a replacement for human capability. In reality, the strongest examples of AI adoption rely on a partnership between people and technology.
AI supports the process. People provide the judgment.
This is particularly true within procurement. Procurement professionals are often required to manage relationships, balance competing stakeholder objectives, challenge existing assumptions, navigate organizational politics, and make commercial decisions with incomplete information. AI can help analyze information and structure thinking, but it cannot fully understand organizational context in the way experienced professionals can.
The same applies to suppliers.
AI can support analysis, preparation and information gathering, but productive supplier relationships rely on trust, collaboration, creativity and context. These are areas where skilled procurement professionals continue to create significant value.
That is why I do not believe AI reduces the need for strong procurement professionals.
If anything, it raises the bar.
Good procurement is not changing. High-performance procurement is.
I do not believe AI will fundamentally change what good procurement looks like.
The core principles remain the same: understanding business needs, managing risk, delivering commercial value and supporting organizational objectives. Those fundamentals are unlikely to change. What will change is our definition of a high-performing procurement function.
Historically, procurement excellence has often been associated with process efficiency and execution discipline. Those things will still matter. But as AI becomes more embedded, efficiency alone will become less of a differentiator.
If every procurement team has access to similar AI capabilities, the competitive advantage will not come from the technology itself. It will come from how effectively people apply it.
High-performing procurement teams will increasingly be defined by their ability to combine AI-enabled insight with human creativity, commercial judgment and stakeholder influence.
The future belongs to AI-literate procurement professionals
As AI becomes more embedded within procurement, professionals will need to become increasingly AI literate. The expectations placed on procurement teams will change. Timescales will shorten. Access to information will improve. Efficiency gains will become the norm.
But alongside those changes, some human capabilities will become even more important: Stakeholder influence. Negotiation. Strategic thinking. Relationship management. Decision-making.
These capabilities are not becoming less valuable because of AI. In many ways, they are becoming more valuable because they sit outside the areas AI currently performs best.
The procurement professionals who thrive will be those who can use AI to improve the quality, speed and depth of their work, while still bringing the judgment, influence and commercial understanding needed to turn information into outcomes.
The organizations that win will not choose between people and AI
Across our client base, we increasingly see organizations deploying AI solutions at pace.
That creates opportunity, but it also creates risk. One of those risks is that AI outputs start being treated as fact.
AI is only as effective as the data, knowledge and context available to it. It still requires people to provide direction, challenge assumptions, interpret recommendations and take accountability for decisions.
AI will continue to make professionals more efficient.
Human expertise will continue to make organizations effective.
And in procurement, the strongest outcomes will increasingly come from teams that know exactly where the role of technology ends — and where the value of human judgment begins.
