The internet was supposed to kick off the procurement knowledge revolution, allowing Procurement pros to quickly:

• find out about best practices
• get commodity and market pricing for products and services
• build reasonable (should) cost models
• find out about new suppliers, carriers, and consulting partners
• research new products and services
• hold truly global sourcing and procurement events in real time
• effectively communicate with, manage, and develop suppliers
• etc.

For twenty years, that’s what it was. Procurement departments who learned how to use the internet properly for research, deployed the right SaaS to support their processes, and identified the right data for their processes were successful in their endeavours.

But then came Gen-AI LLMs, chatbots were replaced with chat, j’ai pété‘s and clod‘s, and knowledge was replaced with whatever content the LLM generated. Maybe it was correct, maybe it was mostly correct, and maybe it was a 100% fabrication — a hallucination if you please. The problem with LLMs is that they are NOT intelligent. They are essentially super sophisticated multi-level cross-connected deep neural nets that go beyond classification to generation of responses built up from sub-responses built up from deep training on incredibly large data sets.

Therein lies all of the problems. It generates built on random probabilities. Those are dependent on what’s in the training data set, what questions were asked, what results are reinforced, and how it’s used. If the training data is bad and full of bad data and falsehoods, the chances of incorrect, and even dangerous, responses being generated are quite high. If the training was biased, the output is likely to be very biased. And if it’s not “trained to please”, the models are fundamentally designed to “learn to please”, so if computations that are a complete lie will increase utilization of, and faith in the model, that’s what will happen.

Moreover, every vendor is now believing the hype from the big LLM players, treating the technology as real Artificial Intelligence (when it should be called Artificial Idiocy), and trying to plug it in everywhere … promising that it will provide their clients with true natural language interfaces, agentic tech, and even BS AI Employees. Those who are adopting it are literally getting dumber by the day. Not only has the cognitive impairment, atrophy, and potential long-term decline from regular use been well documented, but the failure rate has been well documented as well with MIT and McKinsey studies demonstrating success rates of 5% and 6% successfully. Most pilots are being abandoned, sometimes before they even begin, because the tech isn’t even good enough to put into employee’s hands for the tasks the overpriced Big X consultancies claimed the LLMs would be perfect for.

Furthermore, even when organizations are smart enough to ignore Gen-AI, over-automating using the most advanced last-gen (A)RPA and AI technologies will still give Procurement teams a false sense of security and, due to their very low error rate, as time goes on, the team’s skills will go rusty and their ability to deal with true exceptions quickly disappear, especially as the old Pros (get forced to early) retire and the younglings have never dealt with exceptional situations.

The age of AI hype has ushered in a knowledge devolution faster than any age that has come before.

I hope the profession can survive it!