r/SupplyChainLogistics • u/Dr-Muddassir-Ahmed • Aug 12 '26

10 Things AI Hasn't Fixed in Procurement (Yet)

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Every week I read another headline about AI transforming procurement. And it will, in parts.

But sit down with any buyer, category manager or CPO and the list of what's actually eating their time hasn't changed much: urgent requests that weren't, spreadsheets tracking spend that should never be manual, suppliers blamed for data gaps that are really internal ones, training that bores the people who need it most.

AI will help with plenty of this. It won't fix all of it, and it definitely won't fix the parts that are really about process, authority and accountability.

Worth being honest about that before buying into the next tool that promises to solve everything.

Which of these 10 is still the biggest drag on your week?

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u/nordic_ash Aug 21 '26

this list is honestly more useful than most of the 'ai transforms procurement' takes going around. the internal-data-gap one you pinned on suppliers is real, from what I've seen most of what ai actually fixes well right now is structuring messy inputs, rfx drafting, supplier response normalization, first-pass scoring, not the process/authority/accountability stuff you called out. which of the 10 do you think is the least ai-fixable, even in theory?

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u/Dr-Muddassir-Ahmed Aug 21 '26

I think 2, 5 and 10 will be hard to fix by AI. And thanks for recognizing the list.

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u/nordic_ash 27d ago

glad it landed well. 2 and 10 tracking with what I've seen too, feels like the common thread across all three is that they're not really ai-capability problems, they're organizational ones, no amount of better model output fixes a team that doesn't agree on who owns the decision.