Pivoting your Procurement Career in the new era of AI
What the rise of AI means for your Procurement Career
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Bill Gates wrote a piece on Artificial Intelligence, and I always take note of his content. It still blows my mind when I get people in the comments on LinkedIn saying that Procurement Technology cannot help, spreadsheets are good, and we need people to do Procurement. I think the end is nigh for that type of Procurement worker. People said it would be the tradespeople that would get wiped out from the roles first. That was wrong. It’s knowledge workers. And we need to all be on the right side of this technological shift.
Read the full article here, but here are some thoughts I wanted to share because I’ve been talking openly about this since 2019 - The Age of AI began.
Almost every software application, regardless of whether it’s Microsoft with Co-Pilot or Procurement Tech companies utilising APIs with OpenAI or Bard (and more) is figuring out how you can do more with less and in seconds.
Bill Gates notes, “Artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet”.
For Millennials - we’ve grown through this period, and I’m amazed at the speed of change here. I’ve been discussing what AI can do and how it can reshape Procurement Tech. Elouise notes in her book about the idea of a Procurement Chat Bot. She wrote:
“I’ve had a mix view on the use of bots but they’ve gotten significantly better over recent years. if our Procurement and Contracts software had bots, that alerted us when:
Risk positions changed
Before/After we breached our contract obligations (could be payment terms)
Financial changes
Negative news press etc
Then we could have a far better user experience.
Imagine then, if that bot could give us options of what it could do:
e.g request additional information from the supplier, find a replacement supplier, alert key stakeholders, enforce a disaster recover programme etc”.
I’m excited to see this happen, and it will happen. Bill (feels weird righting Bill without the Gates, but I had to try it) notes:
“Eventually your main way of controlling a computer will no longer be pointing and clicking or tapping on menus and dialogue boxes. Instead, you’ll be able to write a request in plain English. (And not just English—AIs will understand languages from around the world”.
And as we move beyond that, we will each have our own personal and company-wide AI assistants. This is why I’m optimistic about building a Personal Knowledge Management System. I will have my future AI assistant embedded within my digital brain, and it will supercharge my connections, thoughts and musings such as this.
Don’t believe me, check this out - “In addition, advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent. Think of it as a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do”.
I highly recommend you check this article out in full.
But what can we do in Procurement:
1 - Start using AI such as Chat GPT immediately daily and familiarise yourself with its capabilities. I use it daily for many tasks, including first drafts of content, summarising my detailed notes, first drafts on social content, planning and more.
2 - Build a Personal Knowledge Management system to detail your Procurement knowledge. AI won’t be able to replicate it; you protect your career and can use AI to supercharge it.
3 - Stop pushing paper…or digital documents. If your current procurement role is one where you input data, do things in spreadsheets, email out reminders etc..…you’re already out of the job.
3 Pieces of Content you might find helpful
Andra Fola has launched Solutionary Minds, the 1st personalised learning cloud dedicated to procurement humans with purpose. I asked Andra to summarise Solutionary Minds for me and she said: “it’s not just tech, it’s a new experience of learning and growing, with personalised content, mentoring & coaching. No hard skills, it’s all about life skills and celebrating the human in us, our superpowers. Made by procurement for procurement”. Andra is an incredible Procurement Pro, and I suggest you look at this.
PS. Make sure you connect with Andra on LinkedIn too.
This post by Nicloas Cole (who created a wonderful book about writing online) is good for people thinking about their careers, much to my above points, in the AI era.
