In fact, as per our 10 words or phrases to ban from an RFP response last year (Part I and Part II), you should ban all buzzwords from not only your RFPs but from your communications with potential vendors. They should be counted as strikes against the vendor and the baseball rule applied (3 strikes and you’re out).

Even though you might be attracted to “social”, “green”, “(Gen-)AI” (which you shouldn’t be, since it’s been proven that all the emergent property claims are false), “autonomous”, “intake-to-“, “discovery”, “multiplier”, and “insights”, etc., you need to remember that the vendors know this and are using as many of these terms as possible to lure you to them and convince you they have the best solution, even if all they have are the best buzzwords.

After all, they know that you are under pressure by your consumers, colleagues, and CEO to be “social”, “green”, and “autonomous” and that, to do that, you need “insights” and “discovery” and that you are all getting swept up in the “intake-to” and “(Gen-)AI” hype-cycles and that you believe it will get you “multipliers” and “delightful” experiences.

So they are preying on your pressures, your desires, and your fears of missing the hype-cycle and being left-behind, even though these “hype” cycles are often literal — all “hype”, no “substance”. Social value is a buzzword, nothing more. Social value is not in applications, it is in awards and actions. The same with “green”. At the end of the day, all SaaS platforms are equally green (unless they use Gen-AI, because then they use ten time the computing resources to do a simple task), they all minimize the need for on-site hardware, but they all eat up cloud compute cycles. The green comes in the decisions you make with them.

Automation is important, but “autonomous” is only useful for tactical e-paper pushing, not for strategic decision making — good computational algorithms can compute odds (and make recommendations) based on the data presented, but it cannot make decisions, and the odds are only as good as the data. “Insights” are only achieved on good data … and if you don’t have that “good” data, you can be damn sure the vendor doesn’t. “Discovery” is always limited to data at your disposal or the vendor’s disposal. If you don’t have the supplier in your database and the vendor doesn’t have the supplier in its community database, there’s no way it’s going to be “discovered”. Also, “intake-to-procure” is useless if you don’t have the solution in place to actually “procure”. As we pointed out in our piece on marketplace madness, intake-to-orchestrate on its own is useless, and a real, modern procurement solution actually has “intake” built in. (So if yours doesn’t, maybe upgrade it to a better solution instead of paying six-figures a year for a view into your data that doesn’t actually add any value.)

Which brings us to the (Gen)-AI hype-cycle. It’s all hype, no substance. There are no valid uses for Gen-AI and even less uses than none in Procurement and it’s all a fallacy considering that even in a decade it won’t even have a 50/50 chance of being truly dependable at the expected rate of improvement. (And if a 200M investment into a new model culminated in the great insight that we should eat one rock a day, maybe it’s time to bury this failed offshoot of AI now before more Billions are wasted. After all, if those Billions were invested in the public school system, that would more than double the current national budget — think of how much better educated your children would be with that increase in funding. Despite the bullcr@p, the future lies in Human Intelligence (HI!), which needs to be nurtured, not abandoned.)

In other words, don’t get led astray by the buzzwords. Value comes from real products that solve real problems whose solutions provide real value to your organization. If the vendor can’t explain that in plain English, then you can be fairly certain the vendor doesn’t have anything truly valuable and you should move on.