because your decision ladder is baked in at the core! Even though we had no clue about it until you made your LinkedIn Procurement Decision Ladder post!

We reached the same conclusion you did — that decisions are not equal, especially in sourcing, and the cost of failure (and recovery, not reversibility — as recovery is never fully possible once a contract is signed, an order is made, or a shipment received, unless, of course, a Force Majeure event happens before any of that occurs) is paramount in how you handle the category in question.

Depending on the criticality of the category, and where it lies between low risk, low complexity, and low impact and high risk, high complexity, and high impact, you’re either going fast and fully automated with a high tolerance for failure (as one bad decision costs little and can quickly be recovered from) as per the first rung of your ladder or slow and methodical with decisions delayed until they are defensible and auditable at the top rung of your ladder (after all, you do have to climb up from the lower left of the lowest octant to get to the upper right of the highest octant if you are living in the Busch-Lamoureux Exact Purchasing Pocket Cube) or somewhere in between in the other six categories depending on the cost of failure and the cost of recovery.

When you know where every category falls, you know exactly how much planning, defensibility, and auditability is needed and, more importantly, how much human involvement. This makes it clear where you can play with experimental AI and where you can’t risk any decision not made by a human expert. (The machine should be used to do any and all analyses that are known and come to mind, but in high risk, high complexity, and high impact categories which have a high cost of failure and a high cost of recovery, as IBM wrote back in 1979, the machine should never make a decision because it can never be accountable for one — as that accountability always falls to you. And the courts globally are [becoming] in agreement with that.)