Category Archives: rants

Blind AI “Agents” Will Only Worsen Any Situation!

THE PROPHET recently posted that The AI Overton Window is Open in Government Procurement and that makes the doctor scared for you. The damage they can do in private situations is bad. The damage they can do in public situations is much, much worse.

The following obvious outcomes that the doctor already noted in his rebuttal are just the tip of the iceberg:

  • biased awards
  • overpriced awards to holdings of the billionaires that provide the tech
  • non-compliant awards because submitting a form is NOT verifying quality
  • billions lost to fraud as foreign bad actors use their AI to game our AI and direct Billions to accounts that will quickly be emptied to offshore accounts and then untraceable crypto!

For those of you that haven’t figure it out yet, all AI is biased as it is trained to repeat the patterns found in the training data provided, and all of that data is biased to existing providers and decision patterns of biased award judges who find sneaky ways to direct contracts to the recipients they want to give the business too (whether or not they are the best value for the taxpayer’s money). If your President and his DOGE are telling you the truth, fraud (and thus bias) is rampant, and “AI” will just perpetuate that.

Since there are only a few players who are big enough to handle the data volumes and computational workload that would be required to support the US Federal Government, they have an effective monopoly. As a result, they can charge pretty much whatever they want and get it. (And we have already seen how overpriced this technology is. Total Open AI funding to date: 17.9B [TrackXn] compared to total DeepSeek funding to date: 1B [Pitchbook]. The model is more or less as good as the OpenAI model at less than 1/18th the cost [although there is the issue of the controlling company and country]. The next iteration will probably be built for under 100M. Just don’t expect any improvements in performance. There are inherent limitations in the underlying model/technology they keep building on, we don’t have anything better, and given that it usually decades between real breakthroughs in research, we likely won’t until the late 2030s.]) The end result is that the government will probably end up paying twenty (20) to one hundred (100) times what the technology itself is worth because of the lock on the market the big players have in the US.

Applications can only process the data given to them, they cannot confirm it’s validity. All a supplier has to do is lie on a form or get a third party to (electronically) sign a false form (with a small bribe), and, voila, the AI thinks the supplier meets all the requirements. As long as the supplier is the lowest cost and/or highest score on other metrics (which can be achieved through the submission of false data that matches what the algorithm is looking for), it gets the award. And the taxpayer suffers.

Taking this one step further, if awards come with an up-front payment, all a foreign actor has to do is register a fake front company on American soil, bribe third parties to help it submit a lot of false forms, game the system, get the award, get the up-front payment, wire it to an untraceable offshore account, and disappear and if that up-front payment is millions of US dollars, its easy money. Now, if the government is smart and insists that there is no payment until delivery, depending on what that delivery is, if cheap knockoffs can be produced at a fraction of the price (that don’t have the reliability, lifespan, etc.), then this trick could be used, and then, after a few large shipments are delivered, and before the poor quality products break down, the supplier could all of a sudden close shop and disappear. If this doesn’t work, if the foreign actors are training their AI to generate realistic looking data to be fed into America’s AI, it’s just a matter of faking a delivery receipt to accompany an invoice for goods not delivered, getting that first payment, and then disappearing. This is just the tip of the iceberg of obvious fraud opportunities (and every worst case hypothetical situation in your espionage movies and books will come to pass, and more).

In other words, only bad things will happen if you try to deploy AI “agents” to do a human’s job!

We need to stop this ridiculous focus on AI Agents and instead focus on AI helpers. We need to end these bullsh!t claims that we are going to achieve full artificial intelligence and instead focus on augmented intelligence and build tools that enable white collar workers to become super human in their jobs and do the work that used to take ten people. Because that IS possible today (and has been for a while, especially since that was the route we were going down before “chat, j’ai pété” came along with its false promises of artificial intelligence, reasoning, etc.).

All we have to do is, for every problem, apply our human intelligence (HI), design, or redesign, a the process to solve it so that all of the tactical data processing (the thunking the machines can do a Billion times better than us) is separated from the strategic decision making (the thinking the machine cannot do) and the machine automatically does all of the data processing and thunking that needs to be done at each step so that we have the knowledge (processed data) we need to make the right decision (and a well designed interface that allows us to quickly absorb the summary, identify factors that might change the typical decision, and dive into the knowledge and underlying data) and be confident in it.

In other words, we shouldn’t be doing the same analysis and running the same reports over and over again, the machine should automate all of that [as well as various outlier analysis] and present us with the summary, whether it is typical or atypical, the decisions and actions we typically make in similar situations, and the results typically achieved. In many cases, a well-designed process and properly encoded knowledge will result in the machine making the right suggestion, and all we will have to do is verify a suggestion. When it’s wrong, the system should still have the appropriate decision encoded as an alternate the majority of the time, and we should just have to select that. And in the exceptional situation we never thought of, or for which it has no data, we will still be able to alter the process, encode our reasoning, and recode the system to suggest the right action the next time the situation arises, meaning that we will not only start off being ten times as productive, but get more productive over time.

The only real constraints we have are on the data we can leverage due to

  1. the lack of good, clean, verified data (and AI will NOT fix that) in most organizations (private and public)
  2. the lack of proper tools to do an office job in the modern age!

For example, if you give me the right modelling, analytics, optimization, and RPA tools, I can leverage ALL the data at my disposal to arrive at the optimal decision (given the time to do so). But how many Procurement personnel have access to all of these tools? Moreover, what percentage of those personnel would know how to fully leverage those tools (considering you need advanced degrees in mathematics and computer science to do so today). And what percentage still would have the time to do so? The percentage can be expressed by a single digit in industry (if you round up). It’s worse in government! But properly designed tools that embed best practice and human intelligence on top of these tools and bring the knowledge requirements down to what an average Procurement professional has would allow them to be ten times as productive in their analysis and make the right decision every time.

Moreover, the compliance slowdown that people are grumbling about is due to lack of good tools (RPA platforms that walk the users through the process) and people to do the work that HAS to be done manually. (And AI is NOT going to fix the fact that health, safety, quality, and oversight inspectors, where you don’t have enough qualified people to begin with, can be fired in droves and further increase backlogs.)

And guess what? We still handle unstructured data better than AI as some of the BS it continues to spit out in what they call “edge cases” is astounding! (the doctor really hopes the maverick doesn’t go mad in his conversations with DeepSeek — it almost drove the doctor mad just reading them!)

In other words, the core of any business function MUST continue to be HUMANs applying HUMAN INTELLIGENCE (HI!), and modern technology must AUGMENT (not replace) every function. Properly (human) designed and (human) implemented systems that use the right Augmented Intelligence technology (not the hype of the day) to supercharge a human-driven process can make the human easily ten times more efficient in some cases. (But left to their own devices, interacting AI agents will, more-or-less, as Meta found out in multiple forays last decade and this decade, self destruct.)

Why Are There So Many Undifferentiated ProcureTech Startups That Still Don’t Solve My Problems? Part III

After all, with over 666 solution providers out there, I should be in solution utopia, right?

In Part I, we said there are three big big reasons for this, they are people-centric, and they all start with F!

  1. Founders
  2. Financiers
  3. Fashionistas

We also discussed Founders in Part I and Financiers in Part II. Today we will discuss the Fashionistas.

Now the doctor knows what you’re saying: “Wait, What“? What do Fashionistas have to do with ProcureTech? And the answer is, well, just about everything unfortunately.

You see, a fashionista is a designer of haute couture, and, today, haute couture is not restricted to clothes … it also breeds into tech, and while one might think it should be restricted to wearable tech, it isn’t. It’s any tech-du-jour that the fashionistas find cool. And, right now, they find FinTech cool. That’s why you see an over-focus on FinTech, of which ProcureTech is fast becoming the leading category, from (some of) the analyst firms and the influencers. Especially if that ProcureTech embraces the current haute couture hype of Gen-AI, whether or not the Gen-AI adds any value whatsoever. (After all, functionally, there is no difference between a $2K designer sundress and a $20 Walmart/Marks & Spencer sundress of the same size and thickness from a functional coverage/cooling perspective.)

Now the doctor knows that you’re probably saying: “so what, you don’t have to listen to them“. And that’s true. But the problem is, it’s mind boggling how many people do, especially at bigger companies. For example, if the ProcureTech player isn’t on a Gartner, Forrester, or IDC map, good luck even getting permission to invite the vendor for an RFI for a core system. We may have made it past the days of “you never got fired for IBM” but we still haven’t made it past the days of “you never got fired for buying the Gartner/Forrester/IDC” recommendation.

These big analyst firms, which feature the same big suites year after year after year with little to no change (because one of them will not include any vendor who is not a paying customer, another will go out of its way to redefine the inclusion criteria each update to what is absolutely minimal to allow for inclusion of all paying customers who want to be in the map [and, in the process, exclude as many non-customers as possible], and the third defines very restrictive criteria to keep the map size, and workload, down, and ends up with a client heavy map). A big company exec following these maps would think the space hasn’t changed in over a decade, even though the biggest change is that most of the companies in the map haven’t done any major innovation in a decade, and don’t appear to be focussed on it either (see the doctor‘s Sailing the Seven Seas Sans a Sextant? piece).

But this isn’t the extent of the problem these analyst firms pose. The real extent, as per our last piece where we noted that the financiers who over-invest and need to make their return pursue the increased pricing strategy (with no increase in underlying functionality or value) do so by ensuring that you are hit with a constant onslaught across all channels, making sure that their investment is hyped up by the big analyst firms and echoed by the Platinum/Diamond/Rhodium consulting and implementation partners. This means that the first thing these PE firms do is have their investment sign a six figure deal with one of these big analyst firms, pay that invoice promptly, make a vague promise to sign more in the future, and get the analyst firm to hype them up like mad. All of a sudden there’s a new Cool Vendor, a new Tech Sub-Category, or something where their investment gets hyped a lot even if it can’t yet make the major map (due to annual revenue, missing baseline functionality, etc.). They also ensure that their the lead influencer consultants at their Platinum+ Partners get these messages and reprints to echo and distribute.

And then, of course, there are the ever present influencers, who are often the biggest fashionistas of the space, with the large-ish followings who will have their newsletters sponsored by these firms, paid speaking engagements at upcoming customer events or conferences these firms sponsor, and other benefits in addition to first access to the firm’s messaging and content for redistribution. This will be especially true if the influencer doesn’t really know the ProcureTech landscape and how valuable a technology like Gen-AI really is to the product being promoted. This is because the less in-depth the influencer’s space and technology knowledge actually is, the greater the chance they will happily echo the firm’s marketing, meaningful or not, because, as one of the more astute readers commented on the doctor‘s Top 10 Ways to be a Procurement Influencer on LinkedIn!, they will happily self-censor their thoughts even without the marketers having to censor for them because they don’t want to cut the branch they sit on. (Or, for you Americans, they’ll happily parrot the message without question because they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds.)

And this is the third reason your ProcureTech solution doesn’t solve your problem, and that’s because the only solutions you hear about are the ones being over-marketed which may not even solve a basic problem for the majority of the customer base the advertising and marketing is (incorrectly) targeting.

In Conclusion

Any one of these F’s will result in a poor fitting solution for you, two of these F’s will result in a struggle to get a return that equals what you paid, and all three F’s will likely result in a disaster. And with over 666 companies, the sad reality is that it is a statistical guarantee there are way more companies that fall victim to all three Fs than you think, at least from your particular point of view.

Remember, even if a company has a good solution that works for the set of problems it was initially designed for (and received an unbiased write-up from an independent analyst), that still doesn’t mean it is right for you. As we have continuously pointed out in prior and forthcoming articles and LinkedIn Comments, YOU still need to make sure your problem aligns, the implementation option aligns, the integration with your systems is possible, the necessary data is available (or at least will be made available by IT), and that you have an independent project assurance expert who’s goal aligns with yours. Otherwise, you’re still falling for the fashionista’s fashion du jour, and failure is waiting around the corner.

Post Script

Please don’t interpret this series to imply that all founders or financiers are bad or that all influencers have evil in their hearts. There are some very good founders (who happily admit their shortcomings, seek out help, and step back at the right time). There are also some great PE firms that make it a point to avoid bidding wars and limit the multiple they pay to what they expect to make back without raising prices to unsustainable levels and then actually help the firm do better at selling. And some influencers honestly think the substance free content they push out is helpful. (It’s not, but they didn’t start to screw you over with bad recommendations, just to get famous and make their fortune off of being a famous influencer.)

However, as you have probably guessed by now, both sides of the coin exist. And the coin is definitely NOT weighted to come up heads anymore. It’s such a shame, shame shame.

Why Are There So Many Undifferentiated ProcureTech Startups That Still Don’t Solve My Problems? Part II

After all, with over 666 solution providers out there, I should be in solution utopia, right?

In Part I, we said there are three big big reasons for this, they are people-centric, and they all start with F!

  1. Founders
  2. Financiers
  3. Fashionistas

Then we went into detail as to why Founders are one of the three big reasons that the majority of ProcureTech firms don’t solve your problems. There were a host of reasons, but the major ones were lack of knowledge about the space, ego, and a reluctance to let either go.

However, founders are only the first part of the problem. The second part are the financiers. Right now, venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) controls more of the space than they ever did, and while it could be a good thing, as there are many PE firms that know how to run a company responsibly and profitably for growth, some of them are only interested in a quick return (via growth and public exit or quick profit growth at any cost for a quick flip to a bigger PE firm), and most of them over invested in the firms they took a stake in during the last market frenzy. They often invested in valuations over 10X in bidding wars for companies that, frankly, weren’t all that differentiated from a dozen of their peers because they wanted into FinTech during COVID when everyone realized you had to be able to do business, and pay, online, and/or saw FinTech ProcureTech as the next big growth arena. While both are true, it’s almost impossible to grow a company more than 7X in their maximum investment time window, and that is ultimately one of the major reasons they are a major problem in the ProcureTech space right now.

The reality is that, even in SaaS (and B2B SaaS especially), you can’t responsibly sustain growth rates of more than 40% year-over-year. No SaaS is “flick-of-the-switch” no matter how much integration the provider claims to have out of the box, how easy they claim the initial data load will be, or how intuitive the User Interface is supposed to be.

Even the simplest module will likely take a few days to a few weeks to get integrated, populated, and configured, and then you will still have to provide training and support. And even if you have “one codebase”, you’re still not going to have “one instance”, and will have to roll those outdates out sequentially so that you can identify unexpected problems (due to unique configurations your developers didn’t expect) and fix them before you have a CrowdStrike scenario. Which means that for every X clients you add (where 1 < X < 10, typically, depending on how simple your implementation, integration, and support requirements really are), you’re going to have to add another FTE (in development, support, account management/client success, etc.), and guess what, training them and getting them up to speed not only takes precious resources, but takes time.

As a result, for most companies, the rate at which they can sustain growth and maintain the high customer service levels (which are critical for SaaS renewals, especially in tough economic times), is usually 30% to 50%, with most topping out around 40%. This says that, for a typical investment, after 3 years, if the company keeps prices steady, revenue will only be 2.75X, and after 5 years, 5.4X. For a top performer, we’re looking at 3.4X after 3 years and 7.6X after 5 years. Considering that there are very few PE funds that are happy to wait more than 5 years to make their investment back, it’s impossible for them to make more than a 7X return unless something changes in the equation.

There’s only four things that can change to affect the equation to the PE firm’s liking:

  1. more/enhanced offerings (more modules, deeper functionality) that increases the price
  2. (decreased) support levels (“do more with less”)
  3. increase sales as-fast-as-possible to get (as close) to 2X growth year-over-year
  4. increased pricing (charge more for the same functionality)

However, (a) requires more investment in development and product, and increases overhead, which decreases profit, and can take one to three years before you see a revenue increase. You can’t do (b) too fast, because as soon as support drops, customer satisfaction drops, and eventually customers get fed up, renewals drop, and revenue drops. So, you can really only do this in the year you plan to flip or go public. This means that most PE firms who over-invest will focus on (c) and/or (d).

Some PE firms will jack up the pre-sales and sales force to sell, sell, sell pursuing (c) and sometimes it will work. However, that will require their investments to quickly add support personnel for implementation, integration, and/or partner support, and if these new hires can’t be brought up to speed quick enough, we have the situation described in (b), which is undesirable. This just leaves (d) for the majority of PE firms that invest too much in their acquisitions.

Now, no one is going to suddenly pay twice as much as the last customer with no real increase in functionality or value, so for this to happen, they have to ramp up the hype, excitement, and marketing … to the max. And ensure that you are hit with a constant onslaught across all channels and that their investment is also hyped up by the big analyst firms and echoed by the Platinum/Diamond/Rhodium consulting and implementation partners. The goal: to make you think that it’s so much better than all its peers and worth that inflated price tag so you buy it and not a competitor’s product. When this marketing barrage works, it’s because you get an exaggerated view of the product, and believe it will solve a lot more of your problems, and return a lot more value, than it can actually be expected to. And this is another big reason why so many ProcureTechs don’t solve your problems.

However, it’s not the last reason!

Why Are There So Many Undifferentiated ProcureTech Startups That Still Don’t Solve My Problems? Part I

Preamble: When the doctor started his influencer series on LinkedIn (with Top 10 Ways To Be A Procurement Influencer), one of the first comments he received was that it won’t get many likes. This was his expectation, especially considering he posted a partial summary of his final installment, One Final Piece of Advice, where he basically told wanna be influencers to find their next job sooner than later. However, that series was tame compared to this one, which definitely won’t get any likes. In fact, it is almost guaranteed to get the doctor a few more haters, but some things need to be explained. (And there’s no need to point out the obvious to him!)

Just Why Are There So Many Undifferentiated ProcureTech Startups That Still Don’t Solve My Problems?

After all, with over 666 solution providers out there, I should be in solution utopia, right?

There are three big reasons for this, they are people-centric, and they all start with F!

  1. Founders
  2. Financiers
  3. Fashionistas

Founders

There are many different types of founders who get into it for many different reasons, but the reality is that the majority of founders of ProcureTech fall into two categories:

Procurement Practitioner

Typically, a practitioner who was stuck in the dungeon of the Tower of Spend with outdated tools, insufficient support, a crushing workload, a belief there has to be a better way, and enough will to quit and try to find it.

Tech Guru

Typically, a tech guru who invented a great new piece of tech which they think will revolutionize the Procurement space or has a history of “transforming” different back-office areas and believe that, if they tackle Procurement, they can solve it too.

But they both have one thing in common:

They don’t know the space. They don’t know the terminology, the vendors, the solutions (beyond the antiquated ones they used), or the unsolved problems (as they haven’t even looked beyond the basic problems that their tech didn’t solve). They Don’t Know. And it’s hard to build a good solution when you don’t know. When you don’t know what your competition does (because you don’t even know who your competition is). When you don’t know what problems your competition is not solving (and what you should be building). And you don’t know what your target customers would pay the most for, now, without having to go through a year-long sales cycle. This holds true for both of these categories of founders.

Let’s take practitioners. They don’t know the terminology, think it’s still purchasing, and don’t know how to do proper research. They’ll do a few Google searches, find a few mass market simple finance payment platforms (such as ramp.com for billpay, airbase, etc.), think they’ve found everything, and start designing their solution. They’ll add a few additional features, basic e-Procurment/catalog support, maybe an RFP, and think they have the best Procurement solution ever designed and run with it. Or, stuck using spreadsheets and email for RFPs, design a simplistic RFP solution, add in some Gen-AI to auto generate requirements from spec sheets and auto-parse RFP responses, and think they’ve revolutionized strategic sourcing.

the doctor is not being melodramatic here. Having analyzed over 500 solutions in his career as an (independent) analyst, he’s talked to well over 500 companies, and asked quite a few of them how they started, especially when he was doing due diligence projects. And when the company was founded by a practitioner, this was the story all too often — that they started the company because the solution they had wasn’t doing the job, the 2 or 3 solutions they looked at (which weren’t at all relevant) weren’t doing the job either, and they believed the market needed a better one. Not knowing the market (beyond maybe what they saw in the odd Gartner or Forrester report), they believed there were next to no modern, affordable solutions for small-to-midsized companies that did what they believed needed to be built, so set out to build one. The good news is that they usually designed a decent solution (as they started with great intentions and built something they felt they could use). The bad news, there are twenty others that more or less do the same thing (already existing and designed by a couple dozen other founders who had more or less the same idea before them or at the same time around the world) and it’s hard to get the message out.

Then there are the tech gurus, who believe there is no modern tech in Procurement, and that the optimization, analytics, automation, and, today, AI they can bring will revolutionize our space! That all the current solutions are missing is modern tech, and if you just inject a bit of it, miracles will happen. This group of founders typically builds really cool analytics-based apps, but tends to miss a lot of the basics or ignore the 80% of the workload an average Practitioner does on a day to day basis, either because they assume the existing platforms do it well (and the existing platforms usually don’t do it well enough) or because it’s not cool. They tend to build better tech but worse solutions.

Short story is that, the majority of the time, neither of these groups do proper research before they start, or when they launch. Not only into competitors, but into the analyst firms (beyond Gartner, Forrester, and IDC), the professional organizations, or the independent experts who they could ask for advice and help. Research that could help them create a solution that checks all the base boxes, tackles some of the thornier problems, and that actually does something different from their competition.

And if this was the worst of it, the situation would not be so bad. It would barely be a problem. The worst of it is that many of these founders not only believe they know everything they need to know about how to build a great solution, but also on how to market and sell it, package and deploy it, build, and run, a company around it. But they don’t. Sometimes, not even close.

And even worse, they won’t admit it. They won’t look for the help they need, and, even worse, they won’t accept it if you offer, even if you offer to help them for free! Some will even get very defensive, double insist they know everything they need to know, and cut off communication. (Fortunately, this particular situation only happens a small percentage of the time. But still.) This is the problem. Not all founders have this level of ego, but some do.

the doctor has direct and indirect evidence for and (personal) experience with the situations described above. Even when the doctor has tried to help indirectly, such help has been ignored. There’s a reason that the doctor wrote a series on Ten Best Practices for (Software) Vendors, a series on iZombie, and two series on Dumb, Dead, and Smart Companies. To politely, less politely, and when they still wouldn’t take the hint, bluntly tell them what they needed to know in the hopes that, since they didn’t have to admit to anyone they didn’t know everything, they would heed some sound advice and not join the ranks of the vast majority of their peers, which, over time, eventually disappear. Having followed this space for over two decades, one thing the doctor knows is 90% (or more) of companies WILL disappear. Not the typical 70% that the statistics tell you for startups. 90%! The lucky will be acquired on terms they can accept, the survivors will be acquired on terms that a decent percentage of their staff continue to be employed, and the rest will just disappear. And the companies with great solutions WILL NOT be spared. Success requires a lot more than a great solution.

The majority of founders just aren’t up to the task. And that would be totally fine if they’d admit it, because not everyone has the skills it requires to grow and run a company, but anyone with the skills to found one obviously has a valuable set of skills the startup still needs, and there’s nothing wrong with stepping back to the COO, CTO, CSO, or CRO role you’re best at, especially if it’s for the greater good. But with a number of these founders, ego gets in the way. But they aren’t the only problem!

Yes I’m Okay, But I Am Very Angry. You Should Be Too! (Part 2)

… it’s about getting it right (and not being right) … and all these influencers care about is what gets the clicks, whether it is right for Procurement or not, because whatever gets them likes and subscribes in their book is being right. Unlike THE REVELATOR, they’re not interested in meaningful discussion, constructive debate, educating you, or at least inspiring you to think critically and improve your knowledge and understanding of your field. Influencers only want the clicks, like, and subscribes that give them their next dopamine hit (and strengthen their belief that fortune will follow fame) and metrics that will allow them to get sponsors (whose messages they’ll never question) to keep going.

But, now more than ever, you need to make the right decision for you. Not only are you

  • under-staffed,
  • under-tooled, and
  • under-resourced

in Procurement, but expected to deliver with constant change in the

  • economic landscape,
  • political landscape,
  • technology landscape,
  • services landscape, and
  • funding landscape

which will often entirely invalidate everything you did and knew yesterday. More specifically:

  • an unexpected trade war will decimate a carefully crafted supply chain you’ve been curating for over a decade,
  • a geopolitical dispute, special military action, attack, or war will spark sanctions and totally close borders
  • companies come, merge, get acquired, and go every day; changing, replacing, and then taking their technology to the grave
  • services companies keep popping up, changing the toolsets they use, altering the toolsets (via partnerships) they offer you, as well as their roster — and just like it’s not the analyst firm, it’s the analyst, it’s not the firm, it’s the consultant (you want an experienced consultant, at least intermediate, and definitely not a junior consultant fresh out of grad school with no real world experience and nothing but a Chat-GPT subscription — which you are very likely to get at a Big X training so many “consultants” on AI)
  • funding mania comes and goes; when it comes, money flows like a waterfall; when it goes; it dries up like a desert; this hastens both new product development and productization as well as company bankruptcy (when the firm over invests, doesn’t see the growth, and drops the tech company faster than a hot potato)

You need insight. You need knowledge. You need education. Not influence bullshit. Because without the insight, knowledge, and education, you have no chance of making a decision that will:

  • identify the possibility of tariffs decimating a particular supply chain, so you know where to focus your risk mitigation efforts (it’s too late if you’re just reacting post tariff because, by then, there ain’t much you can do about it)
  • have the right systems in place to switch to secondary sources if a sanction or border closure comes into effect
  • select a technology provider with a solution that solves the majority of your day-to-day problems efficiently, effectively, and empathically (that works with your business model and mindset)
  • select a services provider with personnel with the right experience and toolset to support you
  • select a technology provider at an appropriate risk threshold; for example, a P2P provider that you depend on for daily transactions needs to be stable; an auxiliary experimental analytics/fraud identification solution is not as critical, if the provider disappears, you will be okay while you select and implement a replacement (although you may want to delay the actual payments until you get a new fraud detection solution in place, but with SaaS, that can be done in a week or two if you maintained the RFP information and just go to your 2nd or 3rd choice)

We need to remember that technology project failure rates have reached an all time high of 88% (in the two and a half decades of project failure the big analyst firms and consultancies have been tracking technology project failure since the late ’90s), inflation is back with a vengeance, consumer demand is flatlining in most first world countries with declining birth rates, non-renewable raw material supplies are getting scarcer and scarcer, and your job is only going to get harder with each passing day.

You need help, not bullshit. And the fact that all these influencers is doing is echoing the

  • soundbite driven drivel vendor marketing
  • analyst firms pushing the current hype and the unproven claims
  • vendors shoving Gen-AI into every nook and cranny and down your throat (whether it is appropriate or not)
  • consultants only spreading the FOMO and FUD

and collectively drowning out the few remaining educators left is just appalling. So, yes, I’m angry. And you should be too!

(And yes, I can curate my feeds to keep influencer content mostly out of them, and do, even going so far as to potentially remove you if you push their drivel my way, but that’s not the point! I know the difference between insight and drivel. Without education, a junior buyer / new Procurement professional doesn’t! And that’s why these influencers make me mad and need to go!)