We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true Angry Bloggers
We’ll rant and we’ll roar when on-line and off
Until we strikes bottom inside the Reddit threads
When straight through the forums to /AskReddit we’ll go
I’m a son of a ‘counter, I’m a geek and a blogger
I can’t dance, I can’t sing, I just sling the web code
I can handle the WordPress and I can write with finesse
Whenever I gets in a chronic’ling mood
We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true Angry Bloggers
We’ll rant and we’ll roar when on-line and off
Until we strikes bottom inside the Reddit threads
When straight through the forums to /AskReddit we’ll go
Farewell and adieu to ye young influencers
You spin a tall tale, which should not be believed
I’m bound to disagree with the bullsh!t that you post
I can’t stay quiet or it’s yokey I’ll be
We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true Angry Bloggers
We’ll rant and we’ll roar when on-line and off
Until we strikes bottom inside the Reddit threads
When straight through the forums to /AskReddit we’ll go
We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true Angry Bloggers
We’ll rant and we’ll roar when on-line and off
Until we strikes bottom inside the Reddit threads
When straight through the forums to /AskReddit we’ll go
And it’s not just because we don’t have enough, as the doctor pointed out in his post on how It Would Be Great If Future CEOs Were Past CPOs (which isn’t happening because we’d need 90% of companies to fail to have enough CPOs for the CEO role), it’s because without them, we are getting lost in a see of sound-bite driven, fact-free marketing, hype, and FOMO relentlessly pushed upon us by vendors, analysts, consultants, and now influencers with next to no one left to cut through the noise and no one to lead you through the land of confusion.
A “true influencer” would be driven by a single purpose – to get it right versus being right.
A “true influencer” would never look to gain consensus but to stimulate meaningful dialogue, leading to greater individual and collective understanding.
A “true influencer” would build a community of active engagement beyond token gestures of likes and thumbs up.
A “true influencer” would actively look to build a diverse community that challenges them and other members to think differently and see a subject or issue through a wider lens.
A “true influencer” would be insatiably curious and always open to new ways of thinking and doing.
A “true influencer” would be someone who has been around long enough to have witnessed first-hand the events that create the needed context to understand how we are where we are today.
Finally, a “true” influencer would stimulate thoughts and ideas, leading to practical and measurable outcomes.
Of course, today’s influencers don’t measure up to any of that, and as they exist only to build their fame and fortune, they never will.
However, true Procurement Leaders, who believe in education (and not hype-based sound-bite marketing), measure up to all of this. And that’s why we need more Procurement Leaders!
True leaders care about getting it right, they don’t care about being right.
True leaders understand you will almost never have consensus across the board, but if you let everyone speak, and take all views into account, they’ll respect the decision and change course as necessary for the greater good.
True leaders build a team who actively engages with them and each other, not a team who just does what they are told without question (as that team is lazy or scared, and neither indicates a work environment conducive to success).
True leaders embrace diversity in their team and their suppliers (to the extent possible, they don’t confuse outcomes with opportunity and force quotas that don’t make sense and just alienate their teams; e.g. if you only have 25% of women in STEM, you can only expect 25% of women in your technical positions; if you locate your office in a 98% caucasian neighbourhood, it’s going to be awfully hard to achieve a 15% African American or a 20% Latino workforce).
True leaders want to learn, want you to learn, and want to find practical, measurable solutions that work for everyone.
True Leaders (and a return of True Educators) are what we need to take Procurement forward. Will The Real Slim Shady please stand up?
However, not sure The Big Money quite captures it anymore. the doctor suggests The Dumb Money. Seems quite apt, eh?
Dumb money goes around the world
Dumb money underground
Dumb money got a mighty voice
Dumb money make no sound
Dumb money pull a million strings
Dumb money hold the prize
Dumb money weave a mighty web
Dumb money draw the flies
Sometimes pushing people around
Sometimes pulling out the rug
Sometimes pushing all the buttons
Sometimes pulling out the plug
It’s the power and the glory
It’s a war in paradise
A Cinderella story
On a tumble of the dice
Dumb money goes around the world
Dumb money take a cruise
Dumb money leave a mighty wake
Dumb money leave a bruise
Dumb money make a million dreams
Dumb money spin big deals
Dumb money make a mighty head
Dumb money spin big wheels
Sometimes building ivory towers
Sometimes knocking castles down
Sometimes building you a stairway
Lock you underground
It’s that old-time religion
It’s the kingdom they would rule
It’s the fool on television
Getting paid to play the fool
It’s the power and the glory
It’s a war in paradise
A Cinderella story
On a tumble of the dice
Dumb money goes around the world
Dumb money give and take
Dumb money done a power of good
Dumb money make mistakes
Dumb money got a heavy hand
Dumb money take control
Dumb money got a mean streak Dumb money got no soul
Right now every vendor is pushing “AI”, and the vast majority of that “AI” they are pushing is a Gen-AI LLM, and often that is just a wrapper of a third party Gen-AI LLM, like Chat-GPT (which only the French know how to pronounce properly).
And they are pushing this as a cure-all for all your procurement ills. It’s the new magic elixir. The new panacea. But, in reality, it’s the ultimate silicon snake oil, because it almost works. And it makes you feel really good when you use it. In medical terms, it’s not a treatment, it’s a psychedelic that takes all your pain away (until it wears off that is). But, just like the spoonfuls of LSD that allowed Bender to become the Iron Chef, it will only last long enough for the vendor to win the contract from you, and then it will start to fade. Until it fades completely when you need it most and fails you utterly when you need to figure out how to deal with a border closing that just happened, a critical raw material shortage due to an unexpected natural disaster, or a trade war no one saw (but should have seen) coming.
This is because, as we keep telling you, Gen-AI, which was built as a predictor technology to predict what block of text, in natural language, should follow an existing block of text (using chain-of-compute), based on training across a very large corpus of existing documents. It’s no more, no less. That’s why it’s only good for tasks that can be reduced to large document search and summarization. (And natural language translation tasks, because it understands basic semantics and can easily be trained to translate to and from any machine language you train it to.)
However, this doesn’t help you with any task that requires actual computation! It’s not analytical data processing, it’s not optimization, and it’s definitely not advanced machine learning for advanced mathematical pattern detection. These are the majority of your tasks and the tasks you need to do to analyze a situation. Buys should be based on the lowest total cost of ownership at the maximum acceptable risk level. Sales predictions, and thus demand, should be based on tried and true mathematical trends, not hunches or market hype. Basic invoice processing should be against business rules for validation, approval, and payment, and that should be primarily based on rules-based automation.
Note that none of these core technologies you need to solve the majority of your problems are AI, as we pointed out in our recent article that said you don’t need Gen-AI to revolutionize procurement and supply chain management. Not to say that these technologies can’t be enhanced by the right application of AI — for example, AI could predict the optimization paths most likely to arrive at the optimal answer, the right curve fitting algorithms to match the trend lines, and the right outlier analysis to identify missing, off, or fraudulent information.
Real solutions come from real tried-and-true AI technology developed over years, or decades, that was designed to solve a specific type of problem, not generic text processing technology that was not designed for the problem, has no understanding of the problem, and will make stuff up in an attempt to solve the problem (which is referred to as a hallucination, but is not a bug, but a core feature of Gen-AI / LLM technology).
This is also why Agentric AI built on Gen-AI won’t work — you can’t automatically build an RPA sequence from a chain of compute that could be completely hallucinatory, and you certainly can’t rely on it to solve your problem.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t a use for Gen-AI, it can be trained to be a natural language interface to these other tools that will work reliably the vast majority of the time (say 95%+ if trained over time), but the use is definitely NOT what you are being promised.
the doctor used to love AI. He spent a decade and half actively promoting it (and wrote two extensive series on The Complete AI in Procurement, Sourcing, and Supplier Management), until Gen-AI and all the false promises bundled with it came along. (Neither it, nor its successor, will be your saviour. It’s not intelligent, not general purpose, and unless your problem ultimately reduces to large document summarization and query, will not solve your problem. Any claims to the contrary are, and, for the foreseeable future will continue to be, false.)
Recently, THE REVELATOR, who is also becoming a little jaded, decided to ask Why does everyone believe the AI hype? (Source)
Of course, the doctor needed to answer.
Why did the American public believe the administration would be any different this time?
(For that matter, why does any first world nation believe their newly elected administration will be any different this time?)
Why does the public at large still believe in the lies that have been fed to them since they were born?
(Primarily American, but Canadians are doing their best to learn from their neighbours!)
Because there is no better producer, packager, and purveyor of Bullsh!t than American Media!
(Although we try, we Canadians can only dream of producing BS that good!)
That’s what the Big AI players use to their advantage
(with their hundreds of millions to billions of dollars and their huge marketing budgets)!
The Procurement Dynamo put it best in a recent comment when he said that we are wired as humans to be lazy and it’s easier to just believe what is being pumped out to us on all the digital channels we consume everyday than do our research, understand the half truths being fed to us, and draw our own conclusions (especially when Math, where the US is now 35th in the OECD PISA rankings, is concerned).
Laziness: Overworked workers being tasked with the nigh-impossible on a daily basis with limited TQ don’t want to design systems, especially when that’s what the vendor is being paid for.
We also have to deal with greed and stupidity making matters worse.
Greed: Investors and rich big company CEOs don’t want workers who want to be paid fair wages, as then they have to deal with worker’s rights (for now at least, but maybe not for much longer in the USA at the rate the government is being dismantled), maternity and sick leave, paid overtime, etc. when they are being promised a software robot that will work 24/7/365 without complaint for a “small” annual fee.
Stupidity: The zealots at many vendors have adopted tech as their religion and messiah and refuse to learn the domain and how to solve a problem with a human centric point of view, believing that, with just a little more development, the tech will magically get there.
And this is why we have so many people blinded by the hype and so many people buying into it.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t real vendors with real AI-backed technology that actually works (because there are, such as ForeStreet that we just covered), it just means that unless you find one of these vendors (which are now in the minority, but SI WILL cover these vendors as it identifies them), and hire intelligent, hard working people who WANT to solve problems and give them the necessary resources to identify these vendors and properly implement ad configure these solutions, you’re not going to get results. Just false promises.
Now that you have the unfiltered answer, do you need to keep asking the question? 😉
