Procurement is moving quickly into an era in which artificial intelligence is no longer treated as an experiment on the sidelines, but as a test of whether teams can modernise the way they work. Yet the central question is not whether AI can add value. It is whether procurement organisations are structurally prepared to absorb it.
That is the theme running through Ardent Partners’ research with Ivalua, which underpins a new series on the path to AI-first procurement. The stud...
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y draws on more than 300 chief procurement officers and senior procurement executives across 25 industries and suggests that enthusiasm is now well ahead of operational readiness. According to the findings, 90% of organisations are exploring or piloting AI, but 67% are not yet ready to scale it. Only 23% have managed to deploy AI across procurement operations at meaningful scale.
The gap is not simply about technology choice. The research indicates that weak data quality, inconsistent structure and limited availability remain major barriers, affecting 59% of organisations. In practice, that leaves many teams stuck in pilot mode, able to demonstrate promising use cases but unable to embed intelligence reliably across sourcing, intake, supplier discovery or spend analysis.
That tension is reflected in wider industry commentary. A webinar hosted by Fairmarkit on AI in procurement described a sector where nearly six in ten organisations are already using or testing AI, but where leaders are focusing on immediate gains such as productivity, shorter cycle times and better decisions rather than broad transformation for its own sake. Elsewhere, Ardent Partners’ earlier AI research argued that procurement is shifting towards an operating model built on automation, faster decision-making and richer analytics, but that the underlying systems still need to catch up.
The latest report frames this challenge as a maturity problem rather than an AI problem. Procurement teams may understand where artificial intelligence could help, but fragmented source-to-pay environments, uneven governance and disconnected workflows make consistent execution difficult. As Ivalua-backed research noted, many organisations have ambitious goals but underdeveloped foundations.
Other recent findings point in the same direction. A separate 2026 ProcureCon chief procurement officer report, cited by Icertis, found that only one in ten procurement leaders had moved beyond the pilot stage, while many remained constrained by siloed data and governance concerns. Zip’s summary of Ardent Partners’ AI-readiness work likewise shows that productivity is the dominant objective for most chief procurement officers, but that serious adoption still depends on getting the basics right.
Taken together, the message is clear: procurement’s AI future will not be won by ambition alone. The organisations most likely to benefit will be those that invest first in clean data, connected workflows and governance strong enough to support intelligent execution at scale.
Source: Noah Wire Services
