McKinsey. Accenture. Cap Gemini. KPMG. Deloitte. Kearney. BCG. etc. etc. etc.
Every single one is putting “Gen-AI” adoption in their top 10 (or top 5) strategic imperatives for Procurement, and its future, and that it’s essential for analytics (gasp) and automation (WTF?!?). One of these firms even announced they are going to train 80,000 f6ckw@ds on this bullcr@p.
It’s absolutely insane. First of all there are almost no valid uses for Gen-AI in business (unless, of course, your corporation is owned by Dr. Evil), and even less valid uses for Gen-AI in Procurement.
Secondly, the “Gen” in “Gen” AI stands for “Generative” which literally means MAKE STUFF UP. It DOES NOT analyze anything. Furthermore, automation is about predictability and consistency, Gen-AI gives you neither! How the heck could you automate anything. You CAN NOT! Automation requires a completely different AI technology built on classical (and predictable) machine learning (where you can accurately calculate confidences and break/stop when the confidence falls below a threshold).
Which begs the question, are they complete idiots who have completely fallen for the marketing bullcr@p? Or is this their new insidious plan to get you on a never-ending work order? After all, when it inevitably fails a few days after implementation, they have their excuses ready to go (which are the same excuses being given by these companies spending tens of millions on marketing) which are the same excuses that have been given to us since Neural Nets were invented: “it just needs more content for training“, “it just needs better prompting“, “it just needs more integration with your internal data sources“, rinse, lather, and repeat … ad infinitum. And, every year it will get a few percentage points better, but if it gets only 2% better per year, and the best Gen-AI instance now is scoring (slightly) less than 34% on the SOTA scale, it will be (at least) 9 (NINE) years before you reach 40% accuracy. In comparison, if you had an intern who only performed a task acceptably 40% of the time, how long would he last? Maybe 3 weeks. But these Big X know that once you sink seven (7) figures on a license, implementation, integration, and custom training, you’re hooked and you will keep pumping in six to seven figures a year even though you should have dropped the smelly rotten hot potato the minute you saw the demo.
So, maybe they aren’t stupid when it comes to Gen-AI. Maybe they are just evil because it’s their biggest opportunity to hook you for life since McKinsey convinced you that you should outsource for “labour arbitrage” and “currency exchange” (and not materials / products you can’t get / make at home) and other bullsh!t arguments that no society in the history of the world EVER outsourced for. (EVER!) Because if you install this bullcr@p and get to the point of “sunk cost”, you will continue to sink money into it. And they know it.
(Yet another reason you should be very, very careful about selecting a Big X for something that is NOT their forte.)
Remember that AI, and Gen-AI in particular, is a fallacy.