PROCUREMENT TECHNOLOGY
“ But while the technology and frameworks may be ready to deploy, a gap still exists within many organisations themselves. Many procurement teams are still working with fragmented data, disconnected systems and operating models that weren’ t designed for continuous intelligence. So while the market availability exists, many businesses are still not in a position to fully take advantage.”
From reactive to proactive For a long time, procurement and maintenance have been reactive industries, traditionally relied on descriptive and diagnostic analytics to look backwards to understand spend leakage, identify savings opportunities or explain what happened.“ Those capabilities remain essential, but they’ re no longer enough,” adds Mita.“ Predictive analytics represents a fundamental shift from a reactive, historical paradigm to an anticipative, forward-looking model that empowers procurement leaders to get ahead.”
Today, intelligent procurement is increasingly becoming a competitive necessity, and predictive analytics sits at the core of this evolution, shifting procurement from measuring past performance to anticipating future risks, strengthening supply chain resilience, and ensuring compliance.
“ It allows procurement to move away from just analysing what happened to actively anticipating and outpacing disruption before
“The organisations that create the greatest value will be those that seamlessly combine AI-driven intelligence with human expertise”
Mita Gupta Executive Vice President and Global Business Unit Head WNS
it impacts the business,” says Mita.“ With the geopolitical turbulence we’ re seeing with increasing regularity, this ability to get ahead represents a very real competitive advantage and means procurement can become a strategic, forward-looking function focused on resilience as much as cost.”
The AI hype: What organisations need to get right first While fully autonomous decision-making( with human oversight) remains the industry aspiration, many organisations are already in a position to successfully deploy always-on intelligent agents in category and risk management.
94 September 2026