Chief procurement officers are being urged to rethink artificial intelligence not as another technology line item, but as a distinct management domain that cuts across the enterprise, according to Gartner.
The consultancy argues that AI is now influencing far more than supplier choice. As it is embedded in software, cloud services, infrastructure, consulting arrangements and autonomous agents, procurement leaders are helping decide where expertise sits, how work is carried out ...
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and which capabilities are developed in-house or outsourced.
Katarzyna Fonteyn, a director analyst in Gartner’s IT Services team, said organisations are no longer buying AI through a single market or budget category. Instead, the investments are spread across business units, often without a clear view of how they relate to one another. In Gartner’s view, that fragmentation makes AI a candidate for dedicated category management, giving companies better oversight, firmer governance and more deliberate decisions about where critical capabilities should reside.
The shift matters because traditional category management was built for supplier contracts and spend buckets. AI does not fit neatly into that model. A company might buy one capability through a software platform, another through a consultancy, a third through a cloud provider and a fourth through a business-led purchase. Yet the same issues recur across all of them: data rights, risk controls, value measurement and accountability.
Gartner says procurement now has to work much more closely with IT, legal, security, risk, data governance, human resources and business leaders. Its role is less about simply selecting vendors and more about creating visibility, imposing commercial discipline and helping the organisation decide what should be built, bought or blended.
That broader remit comes as confidence in AI-related transformation remains limited. In a Gartner survey published in May, only 36% of chief procurement officers said they were very confident in their ability to redesign roles and processes around AI. The survey suggested that productivity gains at the individual level do not automatically translate into team-wide or enterprise benefits unless organisations deliberately redesign how work is done.
Earlier Gartner research has also shown that procurement leaders are keenly aware of AI’s potential. In 2024, the firm said generative AI for procurement had reached the peak of inflated expectations, but added that it could move relatively quickly towards productivity as adoption spreads and use cases mature. It said many leaders expected to adopt it by the end of that year, with early applications centred on contract management, sourcing and supplier management.
Gartner has separately forecast that by 2027, half of organisations will use AI-enabled contract risk analysis and editing tools to support supplier negotiations. It has also said sourcing and contract lifecycle management are likely to be the areas where generative AI delivers the most immediate impact, reducing time spent on routine work and freeing capacity for higher-value tasks.
The latest guidance from the consultancy suggests that the next challenge is not simply adoption, but control. It warns that AI consumption can grow faster than governance structures, while pricing transparency remains limited and data-rights protections are often inconsistent. In some cases, companies are investing in tools before the organisation is mature enough to manage them properly.
Gartner says the answer is to create enterprise-wide visibility over AI spend, suppliers and use cases; establish standards for acquisition, governance and risk; and measure investment against business outcomes and workforce impact. It also argues that procurement leaders need to make more conscious choices about whether a capability should be developed internally, purchased externally or managed through a combination of the two.
The consultancy’s wider leadership vision for chief procurement officers points to AI as one of several forces reshaping the function, alongside geopolitical pressure, protectionism and supply chain disruption. In that context, Gartner says procurement must become more agile, more strategic and more forward-looking if it is to keep pace with an increasingly autonomous technology landscape.
Source: Noah Wire Services
