AI: removing jobs or enabling change?

This simplifies governance, strengthens compliance, improves spend visibility, and reduces administrative overhead. At the same time, suppliers benefit from a streamlined onboarding process that replaces lengthy approval cycles, accelerating time to value for both parties.

This finally creates competition in the tail. Not only are you seeing suppliers that you regularly use, but we can also introduce some suppliers that you've never used before. The whole process is managed with help from AI, from receiving the request, managing that request, understanding the requirements, taking quotations, onboarding suppliers, and then paying them.

From tail spend to nurturing talent

The implications go beyond operational improvement. At a recent public sector forum, tail spend ranked among the top three challenges facing organisations. At the same time, leaders highlighted a growing resource gap - attracting and retaining high-calibre graduates who can move procurement forward and secure continued investment.

AI will help us find this talent. Given that addressing tail spend allows procurement teams to focus on strategic value creation rather than transactional administration, it will help to create the kind of roles that are attractive to the next generation of procurement leadership.

The challenge for us is to find them, and to take people already in procurement with us on that journey as the wider industry is going through this period of radical change. That’s the scary bit. People are worried about what their role might be and how existing jobs might be replaced by AI.

The evolution of AI in procurement may not unfold in the way many of them expect. Rather than replacing people, AI will elevate them. It will remove the repetitive, low-value tasks and enable procurement professionals to focus on what technology cannot replicate - strategic thinking, stakeholder influence, ethical judgement, creativity, and commercial leadership.

For me, the future of procurement is not about fewer people. It’s about better-enabled people, operating at a higher level of impact. That means things like negotiating, understanding and bringing together very complex data points are still outside the reach of AI. That is going to require different skill sets and require people to evolve what they need to do to be effective.

I started my career as a secondary school teacher, teaching English and Physical Education. That foundation has stayed with me. I’ve always been passionate about developing people - nurturing those skills, bringing in new talent and creating environments where individuals can grow and perform at their best. We can do that best by giving people the ability to work alongside AI and to use it as a tool.

The world is moving fast and changing in ways that show how important that is. I've now got children who are either just finishing university or are currently at university. AI is used a lot for research and in their whole experience as a student. It’s welcomed by the university, and if a graduate comes out of that environment into an organisation, and that organisation is not using these tools, they’ll think, ‘What are we doing here?’

"Rather than replacing people, AI will elevate them"

AI as a job enabler

Just to repeat that, AI will not replace procurement professionals - but it will reshape how they spend their time. The role of AI is to remove low-value administrative activity, not human judgement, negotiation, or strategic decision-making.

In practice, our customers see this as a positive evolution. By automating the transactional and time-intensive elements of tail spend management, procurement teams are freed to focus on supplier strategy, risk management, value creation, and stakeholder engagement - the areas where human expertise truly drives impact.

We're removing the need for low-skilled, repetitive tasks, but in any case, people want to get out of those jobs into something high-value. Our work puts more emphasis on the higher level, human practices, like category planning and risk evaluation, which is now going to be done a lot earlier in somebody's career.

There are a few stories that illustrate how, instead of taking jobs, AI can expand what is possible. Take one of our public sector customers in the north of England. They had a very specific requirement to try and use local suppliers and to generate enterprise in their region.

About 20-30% of their tail spend was going to local suppliers. We’ve been able to increase that to 100%, which is good news for suppliers in the region and has a very positive effect on the environment. So this isn’t just about managing the volume of spend - it's about the relationships that we build with others in our network.

It ensures that the appropriate governance is in place and covers the risk element as well, which is where AI becomes really powerful. Loads of regulations exist, and it’s vitally important to maintain compliance with them, so if you have a customer who has a particular policy around a specific risk element, we can configure that as part of our onboarding and use AI to then check for particular vendors.

When you think of a supplier who is based in Newcastle in the UK and who might be ideal for a project, but who might not think of pitching for a project in London, it’s clear that we can create a lot of value.

We even leverage AI in our work with a partner who does early payments to make sure suppliers get paid very quickly. For smaller suppliers, that can be an absolute lifeline. This is a way that AI can foster enterprise and, instead of taking away jobs, this is one of the ways it can create them.

Navigating into the future

Perhaps the main challenge for the future is to ensure that there’s an educational route which equips people with the skills they need to operate in this environment. Everyone who is involved with this process, from companies to educational providers, will need to speed up because it’s happening a lot faster than anyone thinks.

For a moment, the stars are aligning. Technology is suddenly capable of solving some very large procurement challenges, but we also need the people who can continue to navigate us through potential challenges and risks.