Here’s the dirty little secret they aren’t telling you. They aren’t building “AI Employees” (which aren’t real, by the way) because they want to give you a better, more complete, team which is able to work 24/7 and constantly process data, run analysis, respond to supplier inquiries, and have fresh insights in your inbox in the morning.
They are building “AI Employees” to replace you! Here’s why:
1. You Are The Hardest Sell!
A. You are the hardest negotiator! It’s what you do for a living.
B. You do your homework! It’s hard for them to bluff that no one else does this or we’re giving you a great deal when you’ve done your research and know 3 other vendors have similar capability, you know the quoted pricing from all their competitors, and you’ve talked to your association members and know what they are paying for the vendor’s solution.
C. You’re smart, and you know it. The LMFAO sales tactics CXO ego-stroking doesn’t work on you, and you question everything that sounds too good to be true. You’re one of the few holdouts preventing the ChatGPT-dystopia that would atrophy your cognitive abilities to the point you’d fall for their half-truths and beg for their system (which takes us one more step towards their dark city vision of the future).
2. IT Tries to Kill All Your Selections
You’re the biggest threat to IT’s total corporate dominance on system selection and management. In most organizations, every other department falls in line and eventually uses IT’s recommendations (allowing them to stay with preferred platforms or vendors that give IT the best software and hardware toys for free), but you question everything. You don’t swallow the one-vendor / one-ecosystem BS, the big volume discount BS, or the we-can’t-support-more-SaaS BS because you know Open APIs allow for ecosystem integration, that it’s not volume discount but ROI, and that, other then providing the API keys to the systems that the SaaS you selected has to integrate with, there’s no ongoing support requirements for IT. As a result, IT goes hard against your picks and tries to turn the C-Suite against you, complicating and delaying the deal process (and the longer it takes to sell, the greater the [opportunity] cost of the sale, and the less deals they can close in a year. Remember, to them, it’s not about the delivery, it’s about the close).
3. Your Budget is Baseline
In most organizations, Procurement is not sexy and is still seen as the biggest cost center (because too many executives believe profit is entirely dependent on revenue when anyone who can do basic math should realize that if P=R-E, then keeping expenses down can also be very profitable, and if the cost of goods sold is 90% of R, i.e. R – E = 0.1R, then it would take 9 times the sales to have the same impact on profit as reducing costs by 10%). As a result, your budget is baseline and there’s no wiggle room there, limiting their profit margins if they sell to you. On the flip side, they see other big enterprise tech companies making 80%+ margins for tech-cr@p they haven’t updated in years and the tech-bros raising millions, or billions, for AI with nothing more than ethereal claims of future capability, and they want a piece of the action.
But how do they get that action? Well, build something you can sell to the two biggest budget owners in the corporation: the CEO and the CXO, both of whom have been marketed to 24×7 for the past 3+ years by the A.S.S.H.O.L.E. and have now been completely brainwashed into believing that AI is going to totally transform their businesses while allowing them to lay off 80% of their cost-center resources (which, in their view, includes you!).
They’re only marketing to you to sneak in through the back-door, get your blessing, and then when you help them get in front of the CFO and CEO, off comes the grandma disguise to reveal the big bad wolf that lies beneath — a wolf intent on eliminating your job and your entire department so they can get 1/3 of the overall Procurement budget for their custom AI employees that will do all the costly functions you do, do them 24/7, and increase savings by increasing spend under management because they can strategically source, quick-quote, or auction everything you need to buy. (Even though this is an extremely bad idea. If you don’t know why, read our article on why real Procurement Leaders Listen To Roxette!)
In other words, if someone reaches out to you offering you an AI Employee, slam that door in their face as fast as you can while screaming at them to never show their face again! Because, if you don’t, you might just end up unemployed on the street corner screaming about how AI is ending the world, because we already know the inevitable that will happen once companies start relying on technology that hallucinates, (purposely) lies, fails at math, commits fraud, compromises your code, proliferates extremist views, blackmails you, maintains hit-lists, encourages suicide, lets you die to save itself, contemplates murder, and makes you dependent to the point of psychosis (so if got a headache, don’t take an aspirin or query an LLM). [Hint: it’s not good. There’s a reason I’m not yelling loud enough even though I’m already screaming at the top of my lungs.]