Stop racing towards a future that won’t happen, or running away from one you don’t believe. It doesn’t matter. As per our prior posts this week, the doctor has been reading future of Procurement white papers for 20 years now. All of which have promised us radical change. This means that they should have started to come true 10 years ago. Not one did. Not ONE! The reality is that we can’t predict the future, and trying to do so just wastes time and effort. However, we can be vigilant about where things are today, learn the tools and techniques that can make us much more efficient in our job, identify those vendors who offer the tools backed by the right technology to enable us to be more effective, acquire and use those tools, and become at least five times more efficient in our job than the average Procurement employee.

For those who tuned out for a while, this is more-or-less Part 5 of the series we have been running this week inspired by the recent white paper by Jonathan O’Brien of Positive Purchasing and Guy Strafford of OneSupplyPlanet on the Functional ExtAInction Battle where the authors claim that AI might just lead to the extinction of Procurement as a business function. To get to the punchline, it won’t, but the non-stop bullcr@p AI Hype might! (Given how many C-Suites are blinded by the hype that is generated 24/7/365 by the A.S.S.H.O.L.E.)

In that series we told you that, despite a few false assumptions, the authors still got to the right answer, more or less. The conclusion that the only Procurement organizations that are going to survive are those that manage to automate and mostly eliminate the tactical, double down on the strategic, and find new value to bring to the business is the correct one. Moreover, those are the Procurement departments that will be rewarded and maintain more headcount than their peers because, after the massive losses from AI failures and the forthcoming AI market crash, the C-Suites who lead their businesses to survival will be those that realize the value of best-in-class Procurement People and invest in them.

However, that doesn’t mean the training budgets that disappeared two and a half decades ago are coming back. They aren’t. Since they C-Suites are still hoping for the day they can fire you, they won’t invest in you, which means that you need to get there on your own. It also means you need to start now. Start learning, start studying, start identifying very cost effective tools that can be put on a P-Card that will significantly improve a function and return value the quarter the tool is acquired (and before you get the third degree about that unexpected P-Card purchase). Real technological progress, with or without AI, comes from one little win at a time — for each task you do, identify the most time consuming tactical part of that task and automate it. Start with the tasks you do the most and continue until you’ve taken 80% out of all of the most time-consuming tactically oriented tasks you do on a monthly basis. When you reach that point you will find that you have not only digitized, but revolutionized, your function and reached the point where have flipped the tables and are spending 80% of your time on strategic decision making and relationship building and only 20% on tactically oriented tasks — a percentage that will decrease over time as you improve the tools and end-to-end automation across functions.

Furthermore, no super powers are required. Just intelligence, the willingness to study late, get up early, roll up the sleeves and work hard until you sweat through your tears. Like all real progress, it’s hard at first, but it will pay off later — when you still have a job and are delivering above peers while only working reasonable hours.

Moreover, you won’t need deep software (or even system) architecture skills either. Just the ability to define what a process should be, how a tool should support it, and find that tool. You need to be a solution architect — leave the technical and system architecture skills to the experts. If the tool they are selling gets it right at low cost with low compute and high reliability, the architecture is probably such that you wouldn’t do any better.

And whatever you do, don’t waste time playing the paradigm game. Leave that to the influencers, who won’t last near as long as they think they will. Or to the consultants, who will be walked out the door and never invited back once the C-Suite realizes they flushed millions down the drain chasing an AI utopia that doesn’t exist. Just consistently get results, push those results in front of the C-Suite, and tell them that they can call it whatever they want, but Procurement is the function — and sometimes the ONLY function — that gets results.