A 2025 Deloitte survey reveals that leading procurement organisations are doubling investments in technology and emphasising human skills to navigate supply chain challenges and drive strategic value.
The 2025 Deloitte Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) Survey underscores a pivotal moment for procurement organisations globally as they intensify their bet on digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI) while recognising the sustained value of human talent. Conduc...
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ted with input from over 250 CPOs across 40 countries, this twelfth iteration of the survey—titled “Agents of change: Procurement’s big bet on digital”—highlights how leading companies, dubbed ‘Digital Masters,’ are reaping substantial returns from simultaneous investments in technology and people.
According to Deloitte Consulting’s principal Ryan Flynn, companies that successfully integrate cutting-edge technologies, including generative AI (GenAI), with robust talent development strategies outperform their peers significantly. These Digital Masters allocate up to 24% of their procurement budgets to technology, nearly doubling investment levels since 2023, and enjoy three times greater returns on GenAI initiatives. Flynn underscores that digital transformation is not optional but essential for achieving meaningful cost reductions and operational agility in an increasingly complex environment.
This digital shift comes at a time when procurement functions face intensifying challenges, such as rising costs, regulatory pressures, and unpredictable supply chain disruptions—issues that have only grown since the survey was conducted prior to the recent tariff escalations. Flynn highlights the difficulty of demonstrating clear returns on investments traditionally viewed as ‘insurance policies’ against supply chain volatility. However, the enhanced analytical capabilities provided by advanced AI and automation tools enable more rapid, data-driven responses to these disruptions, reinforcing the edge held by digitally mature organisations.
Despite the prominence of AI and automation, the survey’s findings stress that technology alone will not suffice. Automation primarily serves to streamline resource-intensive tasks like spend analytics, freeing procurement professionals to focus on strategic activities that require human insight and relationship-building. Flynn anticipates that by 2027, AI technologies will be embedded across nearly all procurement organisations, but the role of humans will become even more critical—especially in navigating soft skills such as influencing, negotiating, and managing supplier relationships. “In procurement, you actually need to sell more than you buy,” Flynn observes, noting that AI cannot yet replace the human element needed to change minds and drive organisational impact.
Supporting these insights, additional research from Deloitte and other industry bodies reveals that procurement leaders are investing heavily in developing digital literacy and combining human and AI capabilities to create new workflows and knowledge management processes. Procurement’s growing strategic importance is evident, with a significant majority of CPOs now reporting directly to the C-suite, emphasising digital transformation as their top priority. However, fragmented systems and inconsistent data quality remain persistent challenges, as highlighted by experts, underscoring the need for standardisation and integration to fully harness technology’s potential.
Furthermore, trends identified across wider industry surveys—including those by KPMG and Digital Commerce 360—echo Deloitte’s findings. These reports point to automation as the most beneficial facet of digital procurement, a focus on talent acquisition and development, and the imperative for greater transparency and resilience in procurement processes. Digital leaders who successfully blend technology with skilled human judgment are achieving superior outcomes not only in cost savings and avoidance but also in stakeholder satisfaction, supplier performance, and driving innovation.
In conclusion, while the journey towards digital mastery in procurement is well underway, the evolving landscape demands a sophisticated balance. Leading organisations understand that investments in AI and automation must be accompanied by strategic talent development and organisational transformation to fully capitalise on technology’s promise. As procurement continues to ascend as a critical function within broader business strategy, its future success will hinge on this dual focus—betting boldly on digital advances while hedging smartly on the irreplaceable value of human expertise.
Source: Noah Wire Services
