AI – is it time for a reality check?

AI promises to upend the way we do practically everything: coding, decision-making, logistics, even art and poetry. And when ChatGPT exploded onto the scene several years ago, intriguing uses quickly emerged. But recently, cautious investors have warned of the AI bubble bursting, worried about a gap between enormous CapEx spending and delivering value. The question lingers: is AI a technological curio wrapped up in its own hype – or is it bringing real-world business impact?

In procurement, the truth is probably somewhere in between. Not because the technology is without promise, but rather that many organisations haven’t yet determined its most powerful uses. Pilot projects have so far proved a mixed bag and it’s clear businesses are struggling to step out of the exploratory phase and into scale. There’s lots of excitement, but they’re finding comparatively little real-world value so far, notes Rakhi Mullick, vice president for digital transformation at GEP. Mullick shared her knowledge on building an autonomous procurement and supply chain during our AI Webinar Week 2026.

The 2026 CIPS Global State of Procurement & Supply survey results point to cautious AI adoption, with a widening gap between organisations building foundations and those beginning to operationalise the technology at scale. For the first time this year, we asked respondents to score on a 1-7 scale how effectively their organisation is using AI to improve procurement and supply operations. The mean score was just 3.5 – but with interesting differences across industry sectors.

The vast majority of procurement professionals use AI on a weekly basis, says Lucas Videla, head of product marketing at Integrity Next, a speaker on our recent webinar on how AI-driven screening is helping to remove supply chain blind spots. The challenge is getting to the next stage; these are often “very shallow” implementations, such as running a ChatGPT prompt or drafting a report summary with an AI-powered dashboard. All together, tricks like these might save some time, but they are hardly a utopia.

What does meaningful AI rollout look like in 2026?

A third of procurement professionals do report meaningful roll-outs. These teams are using AI to support their onboarding processes, and for risk management and compliance. Some businesses are automating real-time, even predictive risk scorecards with AI, side-stepping the problems of point-in-time analysis, which can only capture information from the past.

Others are using AI to create formal business documents such as RFPs with the aid of large language models trained securely on internal company data. Meanwhile, conversational chatbots are helping organisations glean new business intelligence from collections of old contracts. AI is enabling procurement professionals to role-play negotiations before the crucial hour, and it’s demystifying legalese for those who don’t speak it.

And the landscape is fast-evolving. With the possibilities of agentic AI knocking at the door, we may soon wake to the reality of large-scale automation for critical business processes. “Genuine agentic AI deployments are really the frontier,” Videla says, though he claims virtually no procurement organisations have fully deployed them. 

It is perhaps these fleets of constantly working digital employees that offer the most promise for business transformation. In an increasingly challenging geopolitical and macroeconomic climate, real-time monitoring for regulatory shifts or new risk exposures can all feasibly be achieved by bots. AI agents could be let loose on mapping extremely complex supply webs, a matter of importance given the EU’s landmark CSDDD legislation. That is all potentially game-changing, and even more so given that this data can be automated into genuinely useful intelligence reports that spotlight business opportunity.

Keeping a human touch is critical

Even with these attractive prospects, CPOs must tread carefully. As with all forms of AI, it’ll be critical to keep humans in the loop as custodians of systems that are trained on good, clean data.

Chris Vessey, who is the VP of innovation at Oro Labs, warns against applying what he calls “reckless agents” to inappropriate use-cases. Any top-down insistence on deploying the latest shiny tools without a deeper understanding of where they fit into workflows only threatens to propagate worrisome new behaviours – for instance, shoe-horning AI agents into inappropriate scenarios, where they might just create more busywork. 

According to Vessey, when Oro deploys agents with its customers, the company spends much of its time drawing up effective governance plans; organisations must learn exactly how agentic systems can assist with workflows to track, and then iteratively improve, their behaviour. Human colleagues have a crucial role to play in gauging the efficacy of these agents, as well as ensuring that they are compliant. Of course, if reality meets the hype and the AI bubble endures any popping, the elephant in the room is if practitioners will lose their jobs. Not necessarily so, says Helen Wada, founder of The Human Advantage, provided people adapt. As the name of her consultancy suggests, there’s opportunity as long as people build on their uniquely human talents.

So above all, the most valuable skillsets required of an AI-driven future will depend on building relationships, says Wada. That means developing deep-listening skills to truly understand what stakeholders need. People will need to sharpen their sense of curiosity to explore business challenges from different, unexpected angles. The ideal scenario is that AI automates laborious tasks best suited to computers; human beings remain in control of the rest, but with more time for strategic decision-making.

“You’ll absolutely need to understand how to interact with AI,” Wada says. “But once you’ve got those skills, it’s so much more important to use your curiosity and your judgment. There’s a real opportunity for procurement to add value – but we need to be thinking in a different way.” 

How do you think AI will affect the future of the profession? As part of The Great Conversation, a global dialogue about the capabilities we will need in a world defined by rapid change, new technologies, shifting demographics, geopolitical pressure, and rising environmental risk, we invite you to take our survey on the future of the profession or write to us at thegreatconversation@cips.org.