A Proxima report highlights the growing role of AI and resilience in procurement strategies for 2026, emphasising the importance of strong leadership and clean data foundations to capitalise on technological advancements and future disruptions.
Technology will dominate procurement agendas in 2026, but a new Proxima report warns that successful change will hinge on human leadership and cleaner foundations as much as on high-profile tools.
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According to Proxima’s executive vice president for procurement, Simon Geale, artificial intelligence was ubiquitous in CPO discussions. “AI topped the charts, appearing in every CPO interview, and the contexts were not too dissimilar; our CPOs were primarily rolling out a small number of defined use cases, while also encouraging their teams to capitalise on personal productivity uplifts within defined guardrails… Closely following AI in popularity were conversations about resilience and how to evolve procurement models, the people and partners who comprise them, and how to excel in a different economic context amid a generational shift in technology. In 2026, we transition from a disruption-led to a design-led approach.” Geale framed the year as one in which firms must move beyond pilot projects and embed AI across source-to-pay, planning and supplier engagement to realise scale benefits.
That push mirrors findings from other industry research. The Institute for Supply Management highlights mounting pressures on procurement teams to juggle heavier workloads, rising geopolitical and cyber risk, and the requirement to scale AI deployment without proportionate increases in staff or budgets. The Hackett Group’s 2026 procurement priorities list continuity of supply as the top concern, followed by cost reduction and deployment of AI-enabled tools. KPMG and other advisers describe a shift toward “Connected Intelligence”, where AI links procurement with planning, finance, ESG and customer systems to create an intelligent, enterprise-wide platform. This convergence is also driving talk of agentic procurement , AI agents autonomously assessing suppliers, monitoring risk and even reviewing contracts , a step-change KPMG says could lead to deep automation within digital procurement stacks.
Proponents contend this integration can end the long-standing tension between decentralised buying and corporate control. Nina Bomberg, CPO at Hamburger Energiewerk, told Proxima, “I believe that people often bypass procurement due to friction. If AI can remove that friction and save everybody in the company just 10 minutes a day when they are trying to buy something, they will be forever grateful… At the same time, well-trained AI agents and well-designed prompts not only deliver consistent outcomes but also enable us to position ourselves as a modern, attractive, and forward-looking function. In this way, we can keep our top talent because their work is more meaningful, and attract new talent who want to work in a more modern environment.”
Yet the optimism is tempered by pragmatic warnings. Proxima’s respondents, and other studies, stress that the quality of outputs will be limited by the quality of inputs. Mitzi Campbell, CPO of International Paper, described inheriting a “heavily customized twenty-year-old SAP environment” whose idiosyncrasies made consistent data hard to produce. “While the market is hot on AI, our core is going to deliver significant initial benefits for IP updating. Yes, I want to walk into my room and ‘talk to my data bot,’ but right now we are catching up so that we can build for the future, pushing digital hard. We do use AI for everyday personal productivity, but IP is unlikely to be a leading-edge adopter at the enterprise level,” she said. Proxima’s study and advisers urge firms to prioritise technical debt remediation, stronger data governance and simplified processes before expecting enterprise AI to transform procurement outcomes.
Resilience is the second major thread. With geopolitical disruption continuing and climate-driven extremes increasingly affecting supply lines, procurement is being recast as the primary lever companies can use to secure continuity. Building redundancy through multi-sourcing, diversifying supplier bases and modelling trade-offs will raise costs, but CPOs say boards must accept the premium. Stefan Grunwald, CPO at Henry Schein, told Proxima, “In my experience, risk mitigation, the roots of resilience, is a core priority, and the exec is prepared to accept that there is a premium to be paid for building a new strategic capability. Continuity of supply is not a burden; it’s a competitive advantage.”
Accenture’s research underlines that many executives expect elevated disruption in 2026 and feel less prepared for economic, geopolitical and environmental shocks than for technology- or talent-related impacts. That gap helps explain why one-third of supply chain leaders name building resilience as their top strategic priority, and why procurement teams are investing in improved forecasting, risk analytics and contingency planning.
Complementary technology trends are accelerating visibility and predictive capability across multi-tier supply networks. Industry commentary points to expanding use of IoT, RFID and cloud platforms to deliver near real-time inventory and supplier performance data, while digital twins and AI-driven control towers offer scenario testing and failure prediction. Cutting-edge academic work also points to more advanced, autonomous approaches: recent preprints explore agentic AI systems for automated disruption monitoring and quantum-inspired reinforcement learning frameworks aimed at balancing speed, sustainability and security across AIoT-enabled supply chains. While these research directions are not yet mainstream, they indicate the trajectory procurement technology may follow as resilience and sustainability become integral performance metrics.
For procurement leaders, the consequences are clear. Investments in AI must be accompanied by disciplined data hygiene, a willingness to accept higher costs for strategic resilience, and an emphasis on people and leadership to guide change. Geale summed up the imperative: “It’s about leadership, through a period of disruption and into one of design. The next 12 months in procurement will be exciting, as concepts and changes that have long been discussed begin to be implemented at scale. So, for current and aspiring leaders, the challenge is no longer whether change is coming, but how they choose to lead it.”
In practice that will mean securing board-level endorsement for resilience spending, aligning AI rollouts to clearly defined use cases that span the procurement lifecycle, and prioritising the cleanup of legacy systems and data before betting on enterprise-scale generative or agentic solutions. Firms that combine these elements , pragmatic technology adoption, strengthened data foundations and decisive leadership , are most likely to convert 2026’s disruption into a source of strategic advantage.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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