Generative AI: Steering Procurement Towards a Revolutionary Future
How Generative AI will Impact Your Procurement Role
I’ve read too many articles that promise to tell me how Generative AI (Gen AI) will impact Procurement & Supply Chain but tell me nothing except:
It will get rid of tedious work.
It will make processes dynamic.
It will issue RFX and other documentation for you.
It will help you make a strategy.
It will tell you the risks.
You need data
I’m not downplaying any of this.
But I’ve read dozens of articles and been left feeling underwhelmed. I’ve likely been guilty of this in some of my previous content.
But this is my attempt to nerd out with you about the possibilities of Gen AI (only because AI already does the stuff in those bullet points above).
This will serve as a thought process for me as I collate my notes and highlights into something structured that will hopefully help you…and get you excited about The Future of Procurement.
What is Gen AI?
I want to take two seconds on this, as I expect you all know this by now. It’s artificial intelligence that creates new content based on a set of instructions known as a prompt. Whatever Gen AI system you are using, typically in the form of a chatbot, is merely the consumer-facing friendly area, and there are few, but the most known are Open AI and Bard (by Google). Under these chatbots are the Large Language Models, all the information used to train the AI to make new content.
How Gen AI will Impact Procurement
Digital Processes, a.k.a Workflows
Procurement Processes are ridiculously complex. It’s as though procurement pros are thriving off of the complexity whilst the rest of the business laments it and wants nothing to do with another long-winded and archaic procurement process.
Gen AI could change this for the better. Rajul, CEO of Zip, captures this in a nutshell here:
💡 “Generative AI is one of our top focuses at Zip. We think generative AI will fundamentally transform how requesters, cross-functional approvers, and finance and procurement process owners experience the intake-to-pay process and have made a big bet on leveraging generative AI to improve all aspects of our platform. This is just the beginning,” said Rajul Zaparde, CEO.