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In recent years, digitalization has remained a top priority for procurement leaders. According to Deloitte’s 2023 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey, 61% of CPOs have emphasized the importance of digital transformation to enhance adaptability and sustain a competitive advantage. Artificial intelligence (AI) is still a relatively new addition to the procurement tech stack, but organizations are starting to recognize its transformative potential. According to a recent Oliver Wyman study on ‘Transformative Trends in Procurement’, 92% of CPOs are considering technology, automation, and AI to drive headcount efficiency over the next two years.
To fully leverage the advantages of AI, procurement teams should evaluate their digitalization roadmaps, if they have one, and thoughtfully consider how AI can contribute to their digital transformation journey. This article explains how to integrate AI into your digital roadmap.
Over the past decade, procurement teams have steadily advanced their digitalization efforts. Early roadmaps were linear, aiming for incremental efficiency gains through basic automation. As the landscape evolved, data analytics and smarter decision-making became key priorities, shifting the focus toward both operational effectiveness and data-driven insights.
Now, AI plays a central role in data cleansing, process improvement, and accelerating transformation. As such, the focus has moved from simple automation to augmenting human capabilities, using AI agents and frameworks to enhance productivity and strategic decisions. To fully leverage the potential of digital transformation, procurement must now integrate AI into its digitalization roadmap.
Technology and data are a core dimension of a Procurement Operating Model. In today’s dynamic business environment, operating models must be agile and adaptable, ready to respond to technological shifts and adjust processes and resources as needed. When operating models anticipate and reflect current and emerging technological capabilities and their implications on people and processes, organizations can tackle the complexity in procurement, unlock operational efficiencies, and increase value delivery. Where this alignment is missing, technology investments will rarely deliver their expected returns.
Many organizations already have a digital roadmap in place. This means you will be looking for ways to integrate AI into your existing plans, rather than starting from scratch. By following these steps, you can ensure AI is reflected in your digitalization roadmap.
Before you start considering implementing any new technology, you must first understand what problem you’re trying to solve. Therefore, the first step in building an AI (or digital) roadmap for procurement is to review your operations and processes and identify the key challenges that AI might be able to help address. For example, are you struggling to achieve enough savings? Are you’re struggling to extract meaningful insights from your data? Or are stakeholders complaining about the cumbersome purchasing process?
Once you know what problems you want to solve, research and understand the wide range of AI agents available for the function. The potential use cases for AI in procurement are extensive, touching every stage of the procurement process, from data management to supplier engagement, and purchasing.
Some of the most impactful AI use cases in procurement include:
By starting with a thorough review of pain points, use cases, and available solutions, procurement leaders can identify the most relevant opportunities for their organization and lay the groundwork for a successful AI-driven transformation.
Procure Ai is working with various procurement teams to integrate AI into their processes. Here are the three typical use cases they are pursuing right now and why:
Other use cases like supplier onboarding, purchasing automation, or contract redlining and authoring are just as viable and important. However, they require a broader review of the existing solution landscape to ease their integration.
Once you’ve mapped out relevant AI use cases, the next step is to assess how they interact. Some AI use cases are linked and can deliver amplified benefits when implemented together. For example, autonomous sourcing and negotiations deliver maximum benefit when they are connected to create a seamless, end-to-end sourcing process that enhances efficiency, scalability, and cost optimization. Similarly, high-quality data, enabled through AI-driven data cleansing and enrichment, is amplifying other AI applications like opportunity detection or supplier recommendations during Intake Management. By identifying these interdependencies early, procurement teams can prioritize initiatives that reinforce one another, avoid duplicated effort, and build a cohesive AI ecosystem.
With use cases and interdependencies identified, the next step is to assess the resources needed to implement AI effectively. This includes identifying which internal stakeholders and teams need to be involved, both from procurement and IT, and clearly defining roles and responsibilities to ensure alignment and accountability across functions. You’ll also need to estimate budget requirements for investing in an AI platform, implementation, and change management and enablement.
Considering all the information gathered in steps one to four, you can now start organizing your AI opportunities. Create a structured list of all potential use cases. Then, evaluate them based on impact (high, medium, low) and ease of implementation (easy, medium, hard). Lastly, create a matrix view that maps out all initiatives. This will help you identify quick wins, strategic imperatives, and nice-to-haves quickly.
This visual prioritization helps stakeholders align on where to focus first and which initiatives can deliver value early while laying the groundwork for more complex, long-term transformation. It also supports more informed decision-making when it comes to resource allocation, risk management, and sequencing your roadmap.
With all key inputs in place, you’re now ready to build your AI roadmap. Begin by prioritizing the use cases based on their potential impact, interdependencies, and readiness for implementation. Sequence them logically, starting with foundational quick wins that build momentum and enable future scalability, followed by more complex, high-impact initiatives.
Then, integrate these prioritized AI initiatives into your broader procurement digitalization roadmap, ensuring they align with your business goals, technology landscape, and operating model. Your roadmap should include clear milestones, timelines, ownership, and success metrics (!) to guide execution and track progress. And while this will create a sequenced roadmap, make sure to remember that it is not static and should be reviewed periodically based on learnings and changing priorities. It should evolve as technologies advance, new opportunities emerge, and your organization’s maturity grows.
Most organizations start with a pilot project focused on a specific use case before rolling out AI more broadly. Follow the advice in our article on successfully implementing AI to ensure your first project goes smoothly.
While many point solutions only support a single AI use case, a platform solution can deliver multiple use cases on your roadmap. This makes it easier and more cost-effective to implement and scale your AI initiative without burdening your IT team with multiple vendors or changing priorities. Procure Ai supports a wide range of AI use cases and applications and can help you scale your AI initiatives alongside your ambitions and priorities. You can pilot different AI use cases quickly and expedite your AI journey once value is proven. Procure Ai also offers the flexibility to build custom use cases tailored to your specific business challenges. AI for Procurement as a Service, if you like.
AI is no longer science fiction, nor something only the largest organizations can afford. AI is a strategic imperative for procurement teams unsatisfied with the status quo in Procurement and looking to drive efficiency, enhance decision-making, and unlock new sources of value. To fully realize its potential, AI must be thoughtfully integrated into the procurement digitalization roadmap. Procurement leaders can build the internal confidence, momentum, and capability needed to scale AI effectively and sustainably across the organization by taking a structured, use-case-driven approach and aligning AI initiatives with real operational challenges.
Are you ready to start your procurement AI journey? Contact us to find out how we can help you build your AI roadmap.
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