Category Archives: Talent

China is Leading in AI!

And the real reason why? The courts are defending labour rights and NOT allowing companies to replace workers with AI.

As per a recent posting over on “The State Council Information Office (of) The People’s Republic of China” on April 30, 2026: (Source)

“A Chinese court has ruled in favor of a human employee in a labor dispute caused by AI replacement, which experts said may send a reassuring message to labor rights protection efforts in the age of automation.”

Furthermore, this was not the first time!

On December 26, 2025, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security released a set of arbitration cases for 2025, including a dispute triggered by AI-driven job displacement. In that case, the arbitration panel made it clear that 𝐀𝐈 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐚 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐥. It found that adoption of AI technology is a voluntary move to stay competitive and not one that is mandated or acceptable as a basis for human replacement and dismissal.

Furthermore, legal scholars in China are emphasizing that 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐛𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐛𝐲 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐬 and that while 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐛𝐞 𝐢𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞, 𝐢𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐚 𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤.

This is the thinking that will allow for actual progress and development.

AI is not intelligent, humans are still needed, and progress will be made when we stop accepting the BS that AI can replace us and instead only listen to and work with companies that state that appropriately designed, implemented, and/or restricted AI can augment us in our jobs and make us 3, 5, and even 10 times more effective — enabling us to be super human workers.

It might be too late for the US, but if Chinese courts continue to make rulings that indicate that 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐭 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐀𝐈-𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬, it won’t belong before China is truly dominating the world (since the US will have no competent employees left when everything goes to hell).

If Instead of Trying to Replace, You Redeployed People — What Could You Accomplish?

The big push for AI is not to help you, but to achieve every executive’s dream of a perfect utopia where they have 24/7/365 robotic workers they don’t have to pay, feed, or even provide safe working conditions for. Where they have endless slave labour, workers with no rights, and only have to worry about counting the virtual dollars in their endlessly increasing bank accounts.

But anyone with a working brain, who doesn’t live in a fantasy world, who hasn’t given into the cognitive surrender brought on by excessive use of Gen-AI, knows that reality is far, far, away. The algorithms are dumber than doorknobs, hallucinate to various degrees on almost every response, and are only good at sounding right, NOT being right. Intelligent humans are still needed, more than ever (as AI has NOT changed the fundamentals of Procurement. It HAS Only Strengthened Them.)

While there is very little Gen-AI can do, there is a lot traditional AI, and even more that (A)RPA (the real agentic technology) can do if properly defined, constrained, and deployed — and in many back office functions, a lot of the data analysis and processing (still) done by humans can be done by machines (and could be done by machines for at least a decade — if not two). In Procurement, we’ve had invoice technology that could automate invoice processing error free 95% to 98% of the time for over a decade, auto-reorder technology based on stock levels, forecast changes, or production schedules for over two decades, technology for automatic contract creation based on clause templates and clause libraries for almost as long, and sourcing automation since the first major sourcing platforms hit the market.

If this was properly done, and 80% of the tactical bit-pushing time that, with fire-fighting, constitutes about 90% of a Procurement professional’s time, was eliminated — imagine what could happen. All high impact and high risk categories could be strategically sourced. All complex categories could be examined in detail, BoMs and production technologies optimized, and supplier relationships (and thus supply assurance) strengthened. And that’s just the start.

Procurement would have time to examine, shape, and even divert (and eliminate) demand. From the classic example of negating the need for more printers, paper, and printer ink by just ensuring every employee had a second monitor at their desk and a tablet for mobile document receipt and review to a more modern example of elimination of expensive cell phones for non-sales on-demand employees by Whatsapp (and cheap subscription) mandates or elimination of expensive office leases in areas where most employees are/work remote most of the time and only a few hot-swap desks at a work-sharing centers (and the ability to book / rent meeting rooms for occasional meetings) is acceptable (as they all use laptops anyway), demand shaping can result in major organizational cost savings.

Moreover, Procurement could even go beyond demand shaping and reduction to true value identification by helping the departments they serve define, and redefine, what value actually is and how best to achieve that value when going to market.

A great example of this is how IKEA approached its use of AI in customer service. As per this great summary on LinkedIn by Alberto, when IKEA’s AI bot deflected 47% of calls, instead of calling it a win, firing half it’s staff, and moving on, IKEA did two things.

  1. They asked what the AI bot wasn’t helping with and what concerns still had to be handled by the customer support team.
  2. They retrained and redeployed over half of their customer support team to handle the most common inquiry, and built a ONE BILLION DOLLAR business around it. (So Far! It’s IKEA. And they’re just getting started.)

To clarify, many (potential) customers weren’t calling just about missing parts or issues understanding the assembly instructions. They were calling to ask what they should buy to meet their needs. “What works in a small living room.”

They needed basic interior design advice. So IKEA trained a significant portion of their customer service workforce as interior designers, and generated over €1 billion in additional business in the first year simply by spending the time to figure out what customers needed before they could make a purchase decision (interior design advice and the identification of products IKEA offered that would meet the design criteria) and giving them exactly what they needed.

Imagine how much value Procurement could add to the business if, instead of reducing staff with automation, the C-Suite retrained (or, if the existing staff doesn’t have the education/experience, replaced that staff with an equal amount of more senior personnel) and redeployed this suddenly freed up staff to act as an internal value identification consultancy that brings Procurement (cost management, risk mitigation, and supply assurance) best practice to the rest of the business.

Think about that before you try to replace real intelligent talent with unintelligent talentless AI (and find yourself in the bog of eternal stench that results from your lack of foresight).

Today’s Procurement Leaders Aren’t Enough for Tomorrow

Mr. Matthew Buckingham recently posted on LinkedIn that the strongest Procurement leaders today share three traits:

  • (commercial) curiosity — and an understanding of where value is
  • (constructive) courage — and the willingness to challenge the business
  • (crystal) clarity — and the ability to simplify complexity

These are all great, and necessary, skills, but not enough to survive tomorrow where supply chains break daily, technology is in flux, and your processes can’t adapt (fast enough).

In order to survive the simultaneous supply chain (due to unpredictable, and constantly escalating, geopolitical situations) and technology (due to the Agentic AI [Hype] wave) turmoil that is coming, tomorrow’s procurement leader is also going to need:

  • (colossal) creativity — to build a flexible supply chain that can change on a moment’s notice
  • (constant) crusader — to convince the C-Suite that traditional Procurement is dead

The organization is going to have to

  • dual/tri-source everything from at least two/three locales,
  • have contracts with primary and secondary couriers in each locale,
  • be aware of alternate ports / commercial air cargo carriers out of alternate airports for shipping (and have them on speed dial in case of need),
  • have potential back up suppliers (who came in second) in case of supplier failure,
  • near (real)-time monitoring in place not just for communications, missed communications, missed milestone dates, and other indicate KPIs but events that are likely to impact a supplier’s performance and/or availability,
  • pre-defined response plans for region, supplier, carrier, [air]port, etc. availability, and
  • the ability to reallocate and change plans literally overnight …
  • while treating long-term contracts (or at least long-term expectations of fulfillment) as a thing of the past … there is no guaranteed supply, or even price protection, if the supplier becomes unavailable or goes bankrupt

Proactively building a supply chain and supporting technology infrastructure capable of being reactive in real time is going to take a lot more creativity and crusading than what was ever needed before in Procurement.

Curiosity, Clarity, and Courage is just the baseline.

Find a leader who’s ready!

AI has NOT changed the fundamentals of Procurement. It HAS Strengthened Them.

Procurement, one of the last-areas of the back-office to be hit, is still drowning in the AI-Hype machine that is going full-force 24/7/365, as a result of the self-propagating A.S.S.H.O.L.E. that does nothing but excrete derivative nonsense on a continuous basis, piling it so high that it’s hard not be be Blinded By The Hype!

But, as we’ve seen, this new age of Agentic AI is not accelerating us into the Intelligence Age, but instead devolving us into the Neolithic Age (as it’s now been proven that these technologies are eroding [our] critical thinking skills, and only a few critical thinkers seem to realize that AI is dulling our minds).

Plus, it’s not effective. Studies by MIT and McKinsey last year demonstrated that only 5%/6% of early adopters saw a return. That’s a 94% failure rate, which is even worse than the general technology failure rate of 88% that is the highest it’s ever been in two and a half decades of project failure.

All AI has proven is that you can fail much faster than ever before, but still lost just as much money. That’s because the situation in Procurement is the same as in every other back-office function. Results come from the classic formula of:

  1. PEOPLE first
  2. PROCESS second
  3. TECHNOLOGY third

You need good people more than ever. Sure AI can “process” mounds of data at speeds we’ve never seen, but that doesn’t mean it can extract meaningful intelligence, and even if the intelligence is accurate, that it’s actually useful. Remember, these systems not only process data faster, they hallucinate faster than a field full of hippies at a Woodstock revival concert. But since their grammar and paragraph construction is now better than 90% of the population thanks to the social media revolution that has resulted in the average person having an attention span less than a goldfish and an IQ significantly less than our great-great-great Victorian grandparents, the majority of the population is willing to accept anything they pump out as accurate (even when it’s not).

Only top trained people can properly process complex situations, come up with the right solutions, and execute them. They should be using the most advanced tools available to them to process and make sense of the data using modern Augmented Intelligence technologies, but they should NOT be doing what a dumb system, guaranteed to hallucinate on a regular basis, tells them.

Once you have good people, they need to implement good processes that ensure best practice execution not only by them, but by everyone else who is involved in the process, inside and outside the organization (in partners, providers, and clients). Process allows emerging talent (with good education, great cognitive capacity, and an exceptional [dumb AI free] work ethic) to execute at the level of top talent with the guidance the top talent built into the process, and get the experience they need to become the next generation top talent in the organization.

Finally, once you have the right people, who know what to do, and the right processes, that help them get things done, then, and only then, do you identify the right technology to fit into, and accelerate, the processes. Maybe it’s AI, but chances are it’s traditional, domain-specific, (A)RPA that supports the process to automation levels of 95% to 99%. Dependable, fit-for-purpose, technology is always faster, better, and significantly cheaper than general purpose hallucinatory AI that may, or may not, work on any particular problem.

If you want to survive the current chaos, remember these fundamentals.

And if you can’t remember more than one fundamental, just remember PEOPLE first!

(While you can still find, and hire, people who know what they’re doing. Those of us who grew up before tech took over are getting older and greyer. Without us, not only will you not survive today, but you’ll have no one to train your staff for tomorrow. To think that, as a race, we survived The Great Extinction and, more recently, the The Great Decline during the Younger Dryas era only to risk global civilization collapse as a result of The Great Retardation.)

Dear Graduate, Don’t Skip the Internship … You Need a Gateway to an Apprenticeship!

A number of AI enthusiasts are advising soon-to-be and recent graduates to skip the internship and instead become proficient with AI because that’s how they are going to get a job. And, as you should know by now, it’s bullcr@p. Being able to write a prompt for a Gen-AI LLM that will return a convincing (but not necessarily sound) result is not going to get you a job. The only skill that’s going to get you a job is competence!

As with every over-hyped tech-du-jour that came before ([predictive] analytics, the fluffy magic cloud, SaaS, the WWW, etc), AI is not a silver bullet that’s going to solve all of an organization’s problems and grant magical status to those who have mastered it.

The only thing you’ll master with Gen-AI is the art of the con since whatever it spits out is so well written (compared to the average literary skill of an average high school, and even University, graduate these days) and so convincing that, without expert guidance, an average person is convinced that it must be right when they don’t know better. But that’s not a skill most organizations are going to hire you for (outside of sales and marketing), even if the organization is known for questionable ethics.

Organizations don’t need clueless idiots. They need experts who can assess situations, determine options, decide on the best option, and implement the decision. Someone who knows the analysis to run, the data to collect, the tools to use, the reports to create, the logs to keep, and the contracts to write.

And while you can’t graduate an expert, you can graduate with the skills to start you on the path to becoming one — the traditional skills of math, logic, critical reasoning, project planning, project management, and relevant domain knowledge — not creative crafting of perilous prompts for a flakey LLM that will eventually fail you no matter how much time and effort you put into that prompt.

And if you get get an internship and prove yourself, maybe that will lead to full time job where you can apprentice under a master in the real world and gain the experience you need to go from an adept (with the core knowledge and skills but not the wisdom needed to succeed in the real world) to practitioner (who has gained enough wisdom and experience to manage standard tasks and functions on their own, and who only needs guidance for new or complex situations not yet encountered) and, eventually, to expert where you become the new organizational mentor and the one that new hires turn to for help.

And organizations need (future) experts because only an expert knows when

  • it only has wrong/incomplete data (which will prevent an AI from ever working)
  • an analysis/outcome is wrong based on math fundamentals
    (and when an LLM-based AI multiplied by -1 because you told it to deliver savings vs. find the best opportunities based on price variability, lowest price, market trends, and differential analysis)
  • reasoning is correlative, not causative (which is a failure of not just LLMs, but many people as well)
  • an analysis is incomplete (because only they have specific insight that was not available to the machine or another analyst)
  • etc.

That’s why, if you want to become a true master of your craft, you need to forget the AI mastery and instead land an internship where you can apply the mastery of the real skills you learned in your degree program to stand out, get an apprenticeship, and learn how things work in the real world and acquire the real world mastery you need to get the job you want. Only then will you be able to work your way up to becoming the leader, and expert, you want to be.

There is no Artificial Intelligence (just Artificial Idiocy) and organizations will always need top talent. Automation, and well designed applications that solve real problems efficiently and effectively, will reduce the number of back-office employees that an organization needs and any employee who’s only skill is pushing bits will be eliminated. However, the need for talented employees will only increase to not only oversee the tools and handle the exceptions, but correctly analyze increasingly complex real-world situations and make the right decisions.

At the end of the day, AI tool mastery is meaningless if you can’t logically and holistically analyze the outputs with respect to math fundamentals and a real-world scenario!