Namely, it’s a battle of propaganda versus reality, lies versus truth, against not only the other departments but the vendors selling solutions built on the lies and the consultancies coming in and spreading new lies on a daily basis!
The reality is that even though AI is NOT advancing at lightning speed, the claims around it are and that’s more dangerous than the tech. People are getting lured in to tech that’s not market ready, and that’s why so many projects are failing.
Even worse is the 5% that aren’t failing. Even though most of these are far from a resounding success, when the AI works good enough on the mostly tactical tasks it is installed for, the organizations start to trust it (even when they shouldn’t) and get overconfident on the ability of AI. These companies then approve a slew of AI projects and prematurely get rid of people they shouldn’t, hindering everyone’s ability to do a proper job. This can lead to Procurement extinction when it leads to organizational extinction with not enough people left to deal with the first crisis that materializes that the AI can’t handle.
Procurement has to find a way to win the battle of propaganda and stave off “AI” that is unproven or that is in select use cases the organization is not yet ready for due to a lack of data, systems integration, or knowledge to properly use the real AI that works. Otherwise, it won’t survive, and there’s a chance the business won’t either with one economic crisis after another; supply chains constantly breaking as a result of trade wars, sanctions, and border closings as a result of wars and geopolitical uprisings; demand constantly shifting as unemployment and costs rise; etc.
In other words, as the authors wrote in the Functional ExtAInction Battle white paper we started discussing yesterday, we are in an Age of Disruption, but it’s not the tech (which rarely works), but the marketing and lies around the tech (that all of the psychopathic CEOs want to believe so they can fire all their human workers and replace them with 24/7/365 robots that don’t have any rights and don’t need to eat or sleep). The sad thing is that we’d have a better chance of surviving an age of real AI than this, especially when lying is now sanctioned in the USA and instead of being investigated by the FTC you are given a free pass, and should a state court convict you, you can just buy a pardon! Given that most people didn’t understand technology before the Age of (Fake) AI, how can you expect to understand AI and what is real and what is not?
Moreover, an Age of Evolution has to follow because the C-Suite believes,
right or wrong, that every aspect of their organization has to digitally evolve or they will die. This means if that Procurement doesn’t evolve digitally, it will be replaced by a function, or a team, that does. Fortunately for Procurement, every vendor, and their office dog, now claims to be AI-backed, -driven, -enhanced, -first, -powered, etc. even if they don’t have any AI at all! This means that Procurement can select a solution that works for them, which uses configurable, adaptable, RPA; embeds best practice; encodes decision optimization and predictable, dependable trend analysis in its analytics; etc. and automates 80% of their work error free. They can evolve, look like they are meeting the impossible AI mandate, and get better results than the rest of the business.
Finally, a new world is coming because, once we have the AI crash, vendors with real solutions built on real, traditional, AI models that can now be effective with the data available and processing power at our disposal will emerge. Instead of searching for the magic model that will supernaturally become emergent and achieve intelligence and work on every problem, the next generation of vendors will take the time and make the effort to integrate dozens (if not hundreds) of traditional, appropriately trained, models that reliably solve point-based problems with high, and often near-perfect, accuracy; encode guardrails for the rare situations in which the models might fail; and build workflows that are easy to follow, execute, and even manipulate and that solve the tactical data collection, manipulation, analysis, and export problems that take up the majority of a Procurement professional’s time and deliver no value in return for their completion. Procurement teams that wait to identify and adopt this technology will be the ones that rule the new world, while the other teams (departments, and maybe even businesses) won’t exist any more.
Moreover, the Procurement professionals of tomorrow will be almost entirely focussed on strategic capabilities, as the need for tactical efforts will be rare and limited to not yet seen exceptions (as each resolution will train the platform which will then be able to handle similar exceptions reliably from that point on). This means that today’s Professionals need to start preparing for that eventually. They don’t need to rush, but they do need to start and make steady progress.
When we say the urgency is not as great as the authors make it out to be, we mean it. the doctor has been covering this space for 20 years. For 20 years he has been reading “future of” white papers that proclaimed the space was going to be totally different in 10 years. This means that the space should have been totally transformed by modern tech 10 years ago. Guess what? It wasn’t! Nor was it the next year. or the year after that. Or the year after that. For 10 years the predictions of radical transformation have failed to come true. While the pace of digitization will increase, the trend will continue to hold. After all, the point of Procurement has not changed since the first manual was published 138 years ago. The world may have changed, but the world’s second or fourth oldest profession has not! (Now, if the “sales” profession really was the oldest, that makes the “buying” profession the second oldest. However, before that we had [religious] leaders and stargazers, which are still professions today. So that would make “sales” the third oldest and “buying” the fourth oldest, despite the claims.)
We agree you have to start today, but you will only win the race if, like the tortoise, you go slow and steady and master each step while the others try to take shortcuts with tech they don’t understand, become overconfident in the great sounding (but incorrect) outputs that are returned, get lazy and lethargic as a result, and nap on the job — allowing you to pass them by.
Like objects in the rear view mirror, AGI appears closer than it is. (And that’s a good thing, because if AI actually emerges, we are not likely to continue on this planet.)
Like we said before, the paper is worth reading, it gets the stages right, it gets the mild urgency right, it just gets AI wrong (at least where it is today and will be tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that for quite a while … at least until entirely new models and breakthroughs are made that may actually model intelligence and not just random computation).
Plus, the history lessons (including those which really don’t have anything to do with Procurement, but it’s a nice lesson anyway) are a good read for those that didn’t study history in school (or even remember what happened last decade).