At Procurement Leaders’ World Procurement Congress in London, one theme repeatedly surfaced: as automation advances, procurement’s real differentiator may be less about processing speed and more about human judgement.
Across the three-day event, chief procurement officers returned again and again to the question of where people fit in the operating model that is now taking shape. Mauricio Odovaine, global head of strategic sourcing at Meta, captured that shift during the AI...
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Forum with a line that drew attention in the room: “We are not automating the old organisation. We are designing a new one where AI does the work and humans provide the judgement.”
That idea has become central to the wider debate over artificial intelligence in procurement. The technology already offers scale, speed and consistency, and research from Microsoft and Northwestern University suggests large language models can even perform surprisingly well in tasks involving empathy and emotional nuance. Microsoft found AI-generated responses were often judged as more empathic than human-written ones, while Northwestern researchers reported that LLMs could assess empathic communications almost as well as experts. Those findings complicate any assumption that judgement is an exclusively human preserve.
Even so, the Congress suggested that the most valuable part of judgement may lie not in the technical decision itself, but in the relationships that surround it. Trust, context and the ability to explain why a decision was reached remain difficult to mechanise.
Vincent Cellard, senior vice-president and chief procurement officer at Flex, offered a broader view of the forces reshaping procurement, pointing to greater regionalisation, tighter margins for error and new ways of measuring success. He also argued that procurement needs to “move to the left”, meaning it should be involved earlier and bring suppliers into strategic discussions sooner. His reminder that “agents can’t have dinner” neatly captured the limits of automation in a function where long-term partnerships still depend on human presence.
That tension is also reflected in wider thinking about agentic AI. Industry commentary from GEP and KPMG suggests autonomous systems will increasingly handle execution and routine complexity, allowing procurement teams to focus on strategy, supplier ecosystems, risk leadership and collaboration. But if those tools become widely available, the distinction between organisations may come down to something less visible: the quality of relationships, the skill with which judgement is exercised and the ability to persuade others of its legitimacy.
In that sense, the future of procurement may not be a contest between human and machine, but a division of labour. AI may increasingly do the work. Humans, for now, still provide the judgement that gives it meaning.
Source: Noah Wire Services
