Last Friday we noted that even though we were done with our dumb, dead company walking, and smart company series, that did not mean that we weren’t going to give you good suggestions for 2025 ProcureTech resolutions. The simple fact of the matter is that if you are going to make resolutions, you should at least make good ones. So today we are going to give you five more great ones.

#5 No More Buzzwords (There’s Enough Hogwash Already!)

As per another of our posts from July, the Procurement Space is Filled with Hogwash! Too many marketing soundbites, buzzwords, and overall misdirection. the doctor can’t remember the last time he saw real content from a solution provider on precisely what the solution does (without at least a good dose of exaggeration), how it will help the customer now and over time, and what results the customer can realistically expect in the first year.

And definitely, and we mean most definitely, don’t use any buzzwords. As per our post on Demystifying the Marketing Madness, the following buzzwords, among many others, should be instantly dropped from your vocabulary (if they haven’t been dropped already):

• AI-backed/driven/enabled/enhanced/powered etc.: no one cares; they just want solutions that give results … and a bit of honesty
• Autonomous Sourcing: the entire point of any back-office technology is to automate tactical data processing and workflows that don’t need human intervention; all platforms should have some autonomy, and, moreover, only a small set of categories should be sourced fully autonomously (as per our recent post, the real answer is Augmented Intelligence)
• Delightful Procurement: you’re offering enterprise tech, not a culinary experience
• Intake-to-Procure: it’s not about taking requests in, it’s about executing sourcing, procurement, supply (& supplier) management, and similar events — so who cares if you can take requests you can’t process (no one, and, in fact, this might even upset your customers!)
• Margin Multiplier: what the heck does this mean? anyone?
• Orchestration: this is just a fancy term for easy API-based integration; middleware is not new, and the fact that it’s now SaaSy doesn’t make it special
• Smart Procurement: technology is not smart; it’s dumb; just because computers calculate a billion times faster than we do doesn’t mean they think
• Spend Orchestration: this is just a fancy word for orchestration of Procurement systems
• Sustainable Procurement: all procurement should be sustainable, plus, sustainable means something different to everyone
• Supplier Insights: so generic that every SXM platform can qualify; be specific!

Get the picture? Drop the buzzwords and go back to basics.

#4 No Pay-to-Play, Only Pay-for-Payback

Major analyst firms have recently hiked their fees again. As per our post on does it matter if analyst firms aren’t entirely pay-to-play if the Procurement space thinks they are, analyst firms are now seen as very expensive pay-to-play offerings.

Some vendors are paying the “minimum fees”, even though they are receiving nothing in return. Even worse, as noted in a recent article, some vendors are paying multiple times that, and getting almost nothing in return. A writeup or too. Access to research. A few “leads” that downloaded a select “report”, which aren’t leads at all and rarely result in even prospects, let alone sales.

Real analyst firms don’t charge for discussions, demos, or even basic write-ups. They charge for advice and work product (that you have an unlimited right to if you paid for it) and introduce you to customers who are actually looking for the type of solution that you offer.

Don’t pay for generic research. Don’t pay for papers you don’t get unlimited (non-exclusive) commercial rights to. Don’t pay for shared access to download lists. Pay for research you need. Pay for papers you own. Support partners who can help you identify potential clients who need you.

#3 Get Expert Help

SI has been telling you this for years. You don’t know everything. You’re definitely not experts in everything. So identify your weaknesses, admit them, and get help. Customers don’t care if your team are employees, contractors, or partners. Right now, they want results … and, given that their costs and risks are skyrocketing, they want results fast.

So whether you need help with product, marketing, sales, implementation, integration, or education, get the help, get it now, and succeed. You need to succeed as much as your customers do.

Please remember that, relative to the value they deliver, expert consultants are cheap.

#2 Customer-Centric Focus

By now you should see that the common thread is customer focus. And we don’t mean whatever you can to sell to them — we mean whatever you can do to serve your current customers and make them as successful as you possibly can. The goal should be more than whatever you promise them in sales. Happy customers renew without question. Happy customers trust you and are willing to buy more from you over time. Happy customers are willing to tell their peers about you. Happy customers will speak on your behalf at important events.

Successful companies focus on their customers, who in turn make them successful. After all, implementation success goes well beyond the basics!

#1 F*ck Gen-AI!

If you’ve read our post on valid uses for Gen-AI, you know our disdain for Gen-AI, and that it’s well earned because Gen-AI, overhyped to the max, is hallucinatory, biased (and often hateful), inciteful, scamming, destructive, brain-washing, sleeper, and probably full of dangers we’ve not yet discovered.

Gen-AI, like all technologies, has uses, but very limited ones. It was designed to process massive amounts of data, and, unlike traditional Deep Neural Nets that retrieve a canned response, instead assemble a response as a collection of sub-responses that are, statistically, most appropriate for the request at hand. As a result, it’s best suited for the summarization of large documents and response generation in natural language. No more, no less.

Plus, the recent 85% Gen-AI failure rate reported by Gartner should be more than enough to make you think twice. Customers are tired of the Gen-AI hype. It hasn’t delivered, and for most situations, it never will. Most Procurement processes require detailed mathematical calculations, analytics, and reasoning, which is something Gen-AI doesn’t do and never will (despite what some of the zealots may continue to believe). Plus, as we’ve already said, it’s not autonomous systems or BS AI, it’s Augmented Intelligence which uses the right solution for the problem at hand, which is sometimes traditional ML and sometimes just workflows that encode expert knowledge.

So unless your uses cases are restricted to massive document processing, creating a more natural language chatbot (which can take and forward requests to real solutions), or creating more natural language summaries of massive data sets, there’s no place for Gen-AI. So just F*ck it!

And use real-AI instead. After all, there is so much you can do with AI in Procurement, Sourcing, Supplier Discovery and Supplier Management with the AI we had before Gen-AI! And if you have advanced (predictive) analytics and optimization, the options are endless.