Category Archives: rants

The Proliferation of AI-Generated Content Guised As Research is Damaging Our Space!

Real Research Requires Real Human Intelligence and Effort

(I’m not here to be nice. I’m here to educated and inform. Something most sites, including LinkedIn, are doing very little of lately!)

Joël Collin-Demers recently made the understatement of the year when he said 15 functionalities comparing ZIP to Jaggaer isn’t analysis/comparison, it’s pattern-matching by an LLM with no domain context. At best it’s unhelpful. At worst it points procurement leaders toward the wrong tools entirely in response to, with no due respect, a complete crock of AI sh!t published by TEEM.Finance (and reported by a TEEM member who claims instant supplier sourcing & portfolio analysis, with AI# in the tagline, which is another crock of AI sh!t that I must also address).

First of all, at best someone selects an inferior product, wastes a lot of time and money, and ends up in a situation where they are still limping along trying to get basic tasks done with yet another platform that doesn’t come close to delivering on its promise while doing nothing to deliver an increased return on the large amount of money spent on SaaS supposed to solve the organization’s Procurement pain.

At worst, it points the buyer to a product that costs five times as much, doesn’t even accomplish core use cases (if the product works at all outside the demo lab), and results in an absolute disaster upon implementation (with next to zero adoption and more bypass than the organization has ever seen due to the lack of core capability) that results in the organization having to issue another RFP and go through the whole process again with a jaded and angry employee base who expects nothing good will come of it.

The danger of a poor Procurement product pick cannot be understated or underestimated. Nothing will cripple an overworked and under-resourced Procurement department faster than a bad platform (and doubly so if it contains [Autonomous] Gen-AI)!

So, with so many bad product comparisons and maps out there (including Gartner’s and Forrester’s), which I have tackled repeatedly on Sourcing Innovation, why the need to target this one? Because while Gartner and Forrester can be relied on to give you the generally best bet from among their customers which have been confirmed to have relatively equal core functionality,

  1. a random comparison between two different players based on a mere 15 data points that are randomly selected and called “use cases” only guarantees they both exist in the Source-to-Pay space,
  2. any use of AI is flawed from the get-go,
  3. and any comparison that scores Zip 94% and Jaggaer 100% is obviously a complete and utter crock of AI generated sh!t

Let’s revisit Joel’s comment where he calls out Solution Map (which Hackett will hopefully keep).

  • Over 500 clearly defined functions are scored on a scale of technical progression (from 0 to 5). Not 50. And definitely not 15!
  • A 100% based on TODAY’S known Best-In-Class functionality would require a Solution Map score of 4.0. Most suites averaged in the 2.5 to 3 range (average to slightly above). Jaggaer is no exception (and Zip is still far from a suite, it’s I2O slowly adding baseline procurement capabilities, not S2P). (Remember, I DESIGNED the core Sourcing, Supplier Management, Analytics, and Contract Management [this one joint with Pierre Mitchell] maps and DESIGNED the common core across all the maps for Solution Map 2.0. And I scored them for 7 years.)
  • They DO NOT cover everything … there’s always innovation, and always edge cases we ignored (as the goal was to produce a useful map for the majority).
  • They were TECH and CUSTOMER SATISFACTION only. And you need to assess more than that to select a vendor (as per our Successful Vendor Selection series). (And, sometimes, you have to figure out what you should even be looking at, which is why I penned a 39 part series to walk you though the thought process (and Joel, stop complaining about having to write an 8,500 word series on P2P functional requirements … you’re just getting started).
  • And they compared apples-to-apples. This report compares apple-to-oranges, as it’s conclusions are “choose JAGGAER ONE if your organization manages direct materials, manufactures products, or operates in a heavily regulated sector” or “choose ZipHQ if your procurement team needs to configure complex approval workflows across IT, Legal, and Finance without technical resources“, which effectively boils down to “choose Jaggaer if you need Source-to-Pay, and “choose Zip if you need Intake to Orchestration” which is a recommendation that DOES NOT require you to read a report to figure out. All you need to know is
    1. Jaggaer is Source to Pay.
    2. Zip is Intake to Orchestration

    and the answer becomes pretty f*ck!ng obvious!

In order to be useful, at a bare minimum, this is what a comparison needs to do. Define the product domain being compared. Identify the extent of core, should have, and nice-to-have functions required by a product to support the product domain (based on standard functionality and domain use cases). Create a maturity definition for each function. And then use HUMAN INTELLIGENCE to score each product selected for inclusion (on actual demos from the vendor or willing partners and/or current customers). Not bullsh!t Gen-AI that can be fooled by bullcr@p marketing!

Anything less is not a meaningful product comparison. It’s simply an exploration against a few points of interest.

Now, if that’s human led, that can be useful as supplementary material in a decision. After all, the Solution Map will merely grade functionality like flexible workflow configuration on a standard scale but won’t track specifics of how it’s done, how user friendly vs. partner friendly vs. vendor friendly the configuration is, actual customer use cases where the workflows had to intersect 3 or more departments and average customer sentiment on that feature, or provide any other color that might help you make a decision when two solutions look acceptable from a technical and customer satisfaction perspective.

So, if TEEM.finance or someone else wanted to hand pick the most common / relevant use cases, dive in, do a human review, and present their analysis as key points to consider — that would be awesome, and a great excuse to keep writing (so long as said writing is NOT turned over to [Gen-]AI)!

After all, I’m not going to do it (because, frankly, I’m not interested in seeing the same old functionality over and over [as I already saw, and wrote, about it all multiple times — and you should be able to access that if you have a Hackett Membership] as most of the suites have done little to upgrade anything in the last few years as they have switched private equity ownership and bled key talent), and neither are most analysts (who have to cover more vendors than most can handle — remember, there are over 700 vendors in our space, and if you don’t believe me, I again refer you to the mega-map of 666 vendors SI compiled for you).

But it has to be a real review, based on a real demo and/or real discussions with customers, and not AI in any way, shape or form. Otherwise, at best, it’s sl0p. At worst, it’s the written word equivalent of toxic waste. And let’s NOT forget that and continue to fight against the use of AI where AI should NOT be used!

Now, as to the other crock of sh!t, namely instant supplier sourcing & portfolio analysis, with AI. There’s no instant. Yes, there are some great tools out there that can identify a list of potentially relevant suppliers in seconds, compared to the weeks of manual searching you might have had to do in the past, and there are tools out there that can automate sourcing ONCE you have identified your precise item needs, your price tolerances, and your pre-vetted supply base … but, guess what, AI CAN NOT DO all the stuff in between, especially if the product (or category) is high-risk, high-complexity, or high-impact (under the Busch-Lamoureux Exact Purchasing Framework).*

You have to vet the supplier. You have to make sure it’s still operating, the license certificates, registrations, and insurance are both real and current, that the products are still offered, that they are real (by getting a sample), that they will suit your needs, and that the supplier is capable of producing the quantity you need in the time-frame you need it in. You then have to qualify the risks and impact, sign off on them, and enter the supplier (and approvals) in the system. Then you have to define the sourcing project, your tolerance, and your conditions for bid acceptance. YOU! Not BS AI!

In other words, there’s nothing instant about it … and for a highly complex product, or category, that could be days or weeks of manual human work even after all the tactical drudgery is automated for you. So, while a tagline that said faster supplier sourcing and portfolio analysis, with AI, would be 100% true, a tagline that says instant is inherently false. (Unless, of course, your risk tolerance is sky high and you don’t care if the worst case scenario hits and destroys your business … so if you’re looking to be the next Eddie Lampert and dismantle a 100+ Billion company [in today’s dollars] in record time, go for it!)

# name and image hidden as I’m not entirely sure it’s not a bot auto-publishing AI slop

* to be totally honest, you can’t even expect AI to be reliable for low-risk, low-complexity, and low-impact products/categories either, but since the impact of the mistakes it’s going to make will probably require less manual effort to clean up than dealing with all of those products manually, you can potentially live with it

The Dark Ages Were Bad …

… and, after most of western society was likely still recovering from the long term devastating effects of the volcanic winter of 536, that probably set us back 1,000 years in the grand scheme of societal development and civilization advancement.

… but that’s a minor setback compared to what’s in store for the Age of Retardation that is coming!

But let’s back up. Consider this recent article on LinkedIn by Karl Waldman on this Medieval Lesson: Cutting Skilled Workers Hurts Long-Term Growth where Karl discussed why the age of great cathedrals came to an end.

It had nothing to do with lack of wealth — there’s always been wealth, all that changes is who controls it — or a lack of interest — the Christian religion has consistently held more than its fair share of dominance through Europe from the building of the first great cathedral until the present day (and whenever it loses control in one country it finds a new one to take over). It was lack of skill.

As per the post, the European cathedral builders developed an ornamental tradition so specialized it took decades of guild training to master. When the Black Death killed a third of Europe’s population, the skilled tradesmen disappeared because the training pipeline that produced it had been destroyed.

Now think about what we’re doing today.

We’re pretending AI can do the work of experienced professionals and cutting them left, right, and centre. We’re pretending we don’t need junior workers (because they do the tasks that AI seems to do okay) and not hiring. We’re walking all of our institutional knowledge out the door, as well as our ability to react and fix exceptional situations with creativity (that will break AI when they arise), while ensuring there’s no one around to absorb even a morsel of that knowledge and skill.

We’re not only replicating the end results of the black plague at a rate that’s even faster than the black death spread across Europe (it took about 7 years with the first 4 being the worst) — and not only are we destroying all of our capability to build tomorrow’s businesses, but we are throwing away all of our capability to even maintain today’s businesses if something goes wrong! After all, our current staffing levels are minimal, and most of the people we have left are in cognitive decline thanks to the AI they are being forced to use for “productivity” reasons.

When the next unstoppable pandemic hits, and wipes out all of our silver haired experts with no skilled talent to replace them, we will enter the Age of Retardation and our global society will collapse faster than the Aztec Empire. (And if you don’t know how fast one of the greatest civilizations in Central America fell, maybe you should brush up on your history!)

San Altman is definitely the P.T. Barnum of our age …

But to repeat claims (as per this Futurism article) that he’s the Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-Fried of our age without proving he has the IQ he says he has (which some of us don’t believe he has), or providing evidence he’s the world’s biggest sociopath (as that’s who you’d have to be to knowingly defraud major investment funds of hundred of billions of dollars, funds that likely hold the retirement funds of hundreds of millions of people) seems just a little unfair. After all, if Sam can barely code and misunderstands basic machine learning concepts, which I totally believe (as that would seem to be a fundamental requirement to believing AI actually works and is actually capable of intelligence in its current form), that would seem to indicate his IQ is on the low side and that he thus believes that his AI works and is actually intelligent.

If this is the case, then even though all of his investors will most likely eventually lose Billions (and likely Tens of Billions, and maybe Hundreds of Billions) of dollars on “AI” that will never work, it’s not fraud because he might actually be dumb enough to believe every word of what he’s selling. Fraud, like many major US crimes, requires intent (and, in Sam’s case, would require understanding what his firm’s offering actually does vs. what he seems to believe it does).

18 U.S. Code § 1341 starts off with “Whoever, having devised or INTENDing to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses …”. He didn’t devise the scheme of raising venture capital and private equity, so that doesn’t apply. If he believes his garbage actually delivers intelligence (even though it doesn’t), and will work better with bigger models and better data centres funded by the money he’s trying to raise (even though it won’t), he’s not intending to defraud either. Which means that he’s not a Madoff (who devised a Ponzi scheme with the intent to defraud) or a Sam Bankman-Fried (who willfully misused crypto funds for his hedge funds and pay personal debts).

He’s just a showman peddling his digital puppet theatre (who is blissfully unaware of how bad it is) and if you’re dumb enough to fall for it, that’s on you, not him!

If you’re looking for real fraud, maybe look to your federal government?

PS: I never thought I’d feel the need to defend an individual who I see as one of the biggest scourges of the digital age! But when there are a lots of individuals out there actively defrauding consumers with knowledge and intent every single day and getting away Scott free without any effort whatsoever to even formally recognize the fraud, that was a really unfair byline.

STOP USING AI FOR WRITING NOW! (BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE FOR YOU!)

If you think AI writing is becoming excellent, that’s the SIGN you should STOP using AI for writing immediately.

The reason you think this is multifold, and no part of it is good.

1) AI is too agreeable (and sycophantic)

(Source)

2) This increases your dependence on it

(Source)

3) Which leads not only to cognitive decline

(Source)

4) but cognitive surrender

(Source)

And as for the “I know how to use it, I’m in control” argument, that’s all BS. It’s an illusion because frequent use of AI BREAKS THE MOST RATIONAL OF THINKERS!

(Source)

You might think you’re guiding it, but it’s brainwashing you to accept without question the same derivative cr@p it always spits out because that’s all it can do. Remember, just because the token size is large enough for the LLM to generate grammatically proper English 99.999% of the time, that doesn’t mean there’s any logic or meaning to what it generates!

And yes, the doctor saw all of this coming, as he understood early on exactly what LLMs were and were not. That’s why SI has had a formal NO AI policy (as well as a NO AI BS policy) for a long time now (and never used AI)!

(You have to remember that, as humans, there is a relatively significant chance we will end up using a nursing home at some point in our lives in North America, with some estimates now putting that chance over 50%, and an ever greater chance that when we end up there, it will be [partially] due to mental decline, dementia, and similar conditions. We’re also suffering population stagnation, if not decline, in most western countries. As a result, it’s in our best interest to do everything we can to keep our mental faculties about us for as long as we can, because there’s barely enough health care workers to care for those who already need care as it is. Think seriously about what’s going to happen if, en-masse, society goes all-in on technology that is essentially turning us into drooling mindless idiots and greatly increasing the chances we become unable to care for ourselves immediately upon entering retirement … )

Today is the One Day Procurement Doesn’t Have to Worry About Purchasing Software and Services …

… because vendors try to make a fool of them every day of the year.

As per our recent 3-part series on Now is NOT a Good Time To Buy (1, 2, and 3), vendors across the board are trying to overcharge you on a daily basis, by as much as 900% of the software’s actual value.

Services vendors are constantly trying to push you towards the most expensive offerings (that give them the greatest kickbacks, sorry, partner commissions), upsell you on as many modules (that you don’t need) as possible, drag out the implementation (which they know will be easy because they know you’re not organizationally ready to support an implementation because they didn’t prepare you because you didn’t ask), insist on extraneous integrations using custom connectors, and then up-sell you on training for an overly complex system you weren’t ready for.

Then there are GPOs who are claiming they can save you dollars you can’t save on your own, and that you should hand over a whole host of categories to them for an annual six figure access fee and a slice of every transaction, even though you could do just as good on your own managing the larger categories they want to hand over (by the time you factor in the transaction fee and the amortized GPO access fee) and handing the rest over to low cost Amazon Business.

Then there are the marketplaces you need to use for your tail spend that try to convince you to pay preferred access fees, priority order processing fees, expedited shipping fees (for carriers they control), etc. All extra costs for non-priority goods and MRO.

And, of course, when the sales person at the supplier thinks that you don’t have any other immediate options, they come up with fees you never heard of in order to guarantee that order.

In other words, every vendor and supplier is trying to make a fool out of you every day. There’s nothing else they can try to pull on April Fools day that they haven’t already. Multiple times.

In other words, we’re the one profession that doesn’t have to worry about being an April fool, as we deal with tricksters, cons, and frauds every other day of the year.