“ Agentic AI and more reliable decision-support tools will eventually handle more of this work. We are beginning to see solutions that can interpret documents, compare options, develop recommendations and support acquisition strategy. But we are still early, and hallucination, explainability, security and accountability remain real concerns.”
The road ahead When it comes to the future of procurement, Rakesh sees a function that is largely automated.“ AI will monitor the risk of suppliers and help predict issues and disruptions while making suggestions and even conducting simple negotiations on its own.
Humans will take over in complex business decisions and negotiations,” says Rakesh.
Agreeing, Joel explains that leadership will become more important, not less.“ Some of what is being built is not yet commercially mature, but once it is, procurement leaders will have almost instant access to data, complex modelling, supplier intelligence, risk indicators and recommended decisions,” says Joel. A fully optimised procurement function should be able to take a requirement, connect it to funding, policy, existing contracts, market conditions, supplier performance, logistics, risk and organisational priorities within seconds.“ There is a choice in how organisations use that power,” says Joel.
108 October 2026