Daily Archives: January 30, 2025

For Procurement, 2025 Will Be … A Year.

That’s it. And that’s all folks!

You want more? Even though we just did a 12 part series that was myth-busting 2025 2015 Procurement Predictions and Trends?

Wow! Either you are an unwavering dreamer or a sucker for punishment!

In addition to every major trend and prediction being a straight-forward copy of last years’, where only the cool tech has changed (name), every prediction that goes too far from the norm will prove to be, as always, dead-wrong. 2025 is just a continuation of 2024 (but worse), which was just a continuation of 2023, all the way back to 2020 (which was just 2019 to the nth degree thanks to COVID-19). Except now we have more disruptions caused by the return of the 45th as the 47th who, on his whims or the whims of his Billionaire buddies, will revive a whole host of disruptions to throw at you that you hoped you were done with years, or decades, ago. (Enjoy tariffs! Enjoy sanctions! Enjoy closed borders! And that’s just the beginning. They have to Make America Great Again at any cost! [Just remember, it’s their definition, not necessarily yours.])

But here’s a few more points we need to address.

1. This won’t be the year of Outcomes.
Why? Because every year is the year of “Cost Savings”. Costs keep going up. Risks keep going up. Competition keeps increasing. Sales keep staying flat (or falling) because of constantly decreased buying power in the working class. And investors are demanding ever increasing profit margins. There’s no room to focus on anything else as far as the C-Suite is concerned. (Because, as we pointed out, they only care about short term profits. Long term thinking was thrown out the window over three decades ago.)

2. AI Agents won’t save you.
Why? Simply put, they are dumber than doornails, and you need real Human Intelligence (HI!) to solve today’s Procurement problems. But we all know that the more tech appears to accelerate while competition races costs to the bottom, the faster it’s experimented with. And we mean experimented with. Many organizations will try, and even buy in, but when these solutions start failing, the tech will be abandoned and organizations will back of from tech until the next tech craze solution hits the market.

3. Apprenticeships won’t reappear.
Why? Because organizations won’t pay for training, and that’s paying an employee to learn and a senior employee to mentor. While it is the only way to save certain professions in North America, the lack of foresight up until now should tell you that there’s just not enough foresight to bring this back en-masse, which is what is needed. (In other words, you may see these reappear in a few select enterprises as a counter to DEI programs that were abused and recently terminated, but they will be the exception and not the rule, and not likely to stick around.)

4. The coming M&A surge cycle won’t help you, even though it will be the biggest in two decades.
Just like a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a heaping pile of bull manure will smell as sh!tty. And with the over-investments likely to occur at its peak, it’s just going to drive the prices up on rather mundane solutions … while pushing likely better solutions out of business as they won’t have the funding to cut through the surge of marketing BS that is going to peak after these companies get huge cash influxes. (Because the tech and Procurement focussed founders of the better solutions, who are problem solvers and not snake oil salespeople, can’t hype their story as much as the savvy sales people and former CEOs who will manage to sell solutions with very little substance using their ability to smooth talk until the investment sounds sexy [even though a sober look would show it’s not a 10, but a 01]).

5. The new leaders being instated across the free world won’t save us and definitely won’t bring a new golden age to Procurement!
(They will bring a Guilded Age to trump the one a century ago, and since there is no Roosevelt on the horizon to save us, that is a very bad thing.)
Considering all they are interested in doing is lining their pockets and those of their Billionaire friends while still pretending trickle on economics, sorry, trickle down economics, is a good thing, fat chance. The best we can hope for is that they don’t start WW III.

In other words, it’s another year of hardship for Procurement, just like every year in every Procurement Manager’s history. Same struggle, just a different name for the problem and the tech of the day.