Procurement must embrace relationship skills to survive the AI revolution

As automation and AI reshape procurement, the profession faces a critical shift from transactional tasks to relationship-led expertise, demanding judgement, ethics, and emotional intelligence for long-term survival.

Procurement’s evolving. It has no choice. Automation and AI are not “coming” for procurement. They are already here. Large parts of the discipline – analytics, reporting, compliance checks, basic sourcing mechanics – are being eaten...

So procurement has a simple choice: evolve, or become irrelevant.

If the profession wants to survive, it needs to stop pretending that its future lies in doing the same analytical work slightly faster. That battle’s already lost. The real question is whether procurement can move decisively into the areas that AI cannot service.

And there is no right of passage. Those areas are uncomfortable. They require judgment. Professionalism. Ethics. Negotiation. Relationship leadership. Human behaviour. Accountability.

Unfortunately, this is where procurement has historically struggled the most.

For years, the profession rewarded people for being technically competent, process-driven, and analytically neat. That made sense when procurement was largely transactional. But that era’s passed. Today’s value is not unlocked in spreadsheets. It lives in conversations, trust, influence, and the ability to operate credibly inside, and outside a business.

Procurement is becoming less analytical and more relationship-led. That is not a soft shift. It’s a brutal one.

And many people in the profession are simply not equipped for it.

Too many practitioners do not know how to work with other people. They default to binary thinking. They hide behind process. They confuse rigidity with professionalism and rudeness with strength. They treat suppliers as adversaries, I’d even say colleagues as obstacles, and communication as something to be avoided rather than mastered.

Ghosting is a perfect example. It has somehow become normal behaviour in procurement. It’s not. It’s weak, disrespectful, and corrosive. If you cannot have a difficult conversation, you have no business being anywhere near negotiation or supplier relationships.

Let’s be clear: procurement has carried a bad reputation for years, and it didn’t earn that reputation by accident. It earned it because too many people in the function behaved badly while telling themselves they were being “commercial”.

They weren’t. They were unprofessional.

Now the profession is facing a reckoning. As automation strips away low-value work, the only safe ground left is higher up the value ladder. That ground demands business acumen, emotional intelligence, ethical judgment, and the ability to build and sustain relationships over time.

If you are scrambling upward to survive, ask yourself some hard questions:

• Are you actually good at business?
• Can you speak to people properly?
• Can you negotiate without posturing?
• Can you manage conflict without hiding?
• Can you build trust and still deliver outcomes?

If the answer is no, AI is not your biggest problem.

And if you have no interest in developing those capabilities – if you prefer to stay binary, rude, evasive, or transactional – then procurement is not the place for you anymore. Quite frankly, you should get out.

Because the future of procurement depends on becoming a serious business function, not a procedural gatekeeper. If it fails to make that transition, it will not be “transformed”.

It will simply dwindle and die.

And this time, there will be no one else to blame.

Sheldon Mydat is a senior procurement and supply chain leader with more than 25 years’ commercial experience across central government, defence, finance, and major enterprise environments. A three-time founder and 2023 IDC-named Innovator, he is recognised for advancing Procurement 5.0 and modern SRM through both practice and technology.