Everyone is still jumping on the I2O (Intake-to-Orchestration), Agentic, and AI-hype bandwagons (and when one heads for the cliff, jumping on the next one) because they see the speed boost it is supposedly giving their peers and the purveyors of this depraved mind porn are promising that it will take them from being tactically-oriented fire-fighters to strategic spend sleuths who will magically save money while reducing stock-outs, risk, breakage and spoilage, service errors, etc. In other words, simply by adopting the tech-du-jour, and getting faster, they will magically improve across the board.
Anyone who isn’t suffering severe (Gen) AI-induced cognitive atrophy should realize this is the biggest crock of bullshit we’ve yet been served in the Procurement space.
It doesn’t matter how fast you go, how many RFPs you can automate, how many suppliers you can search, and how many risks you can theoretically track, it matters how many truly strategic RFPs you can successfully execute properly, how many appropriate suppliers you can develop relationships with, and how many risks you can mitigate. Guess what? Strategic RFPS can’t be successfully executed with speed, only finesse. Relationships take time, as they take trust, and that takes time. Mitigation plans take deep thought, scenario planning, and even war gaming — to understand what will happens when man-made wars or natural disaster (where the environment itself declares war on your supply chain) disrupt your supply chain. This mitigation planning takes deep thought and time to work through the details — time that cannot be reduced by AI. AI can only regurgitate previous responses to previous situations that worked, it cannot predict new eventualities or determine what would work best against them because that requires real human intelligence (HI!).
What everyone forgets is what inevitably happens when you run too fast — you get exhausted too soon, and collapse. There’s more than one reason the tortoise will beat the hare every time. It’s not just because the hare is cocky, it’s because the hare will try to rush that which cannot be. There’s a deeper meaning to Aesop’s Fable than you are taught in grade school.
It’s not how many RFPs you can automate, it’s how many you run where you get real results. You get real results only where the category is strategic, the spend significant, the supply chain unoptimized, and the opportunity for improvement real. You don’t get results simply sending every category to an RFQ and shaving a percent or two off the price. You get results by improving quality, supply assurance, price predictability, risk reduction, and real human relationships. This requires an investment in time, not tech.
Speed does not help, and all technology focussed on simply increasing speed does is hinder.