6 Takeaways from the 2026 Procurement Agenda & Key Issues Study
The Hackett Group’s 2026 Procurement Agenda study is out. Here are the six findings procurement leaders need to act on.
Want more content like this? Sign up for our monthly newsletter.
If you’ve had a gut instinct that procurement is getting harder, you may be more right than you realize.
The 2026 Procurement Agenda and Key Issues Study by The Hackett Group surveyed procurement leaders at midsize and large enterprises about their strategic priorities and initiatives for this year.
These six key takeaways give you a sense of what other procurement leaders are grappling with, and how the most successful ones are using strategic AI and contracting to handle mounting pressure.
1. Supply continuity is mission-critical
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room for procurement teams—or more like elephants. Tariffs, geopolitical instability, economic pressure, and shipping costs have wreaked havoc on some teams.
These forces were probably top of mind when The Hackett Group survey participants shared their priorities for 2026. As a result, ensuring supply continuity is the top procurement objective for 2026, surpassing cost reduction for the first time in years.
Supply issues are top of mind for procurement leaders across industries, driven by ongoing geopolitical disruption and trade tensions that the Hackett survey calls ‘significantly elevated’ compared to last year.
While cybersecurity still ranks as the most prevalent company-wide risk, trade wars rose sharply to the number two spot. 42% of respondents listed trade wars as a major enterprise-wide concern, and another 36% consider it a moderate concern.
Tom Mills described the structural fragility that’s driving the anxiety:
The pressure here is that we’re becoming more and more dependent on certain countries for our supply chain, and that creates a sense of fragility. That means we have fewer options, which means when something goes wrong—whether that’s politically, economically, or even the weather—that can expose our targets and have a real impact on the business.
Tom MillsProcurement Protagonist, Procure Bites
Our State of AI in Procurement research found that procurement teams in manufacturing ranked AI’s impact on identifying and mitigating supply chain risks at 8.4/10, one of the highest benefit scores in the entire report. In transportation, 60% of teams are using AI to monitor market conditions affecting supply chains. Business services and healthcare aren’t far behind, with contingency planning for supply disruptions scoring 8.6/10 and 8.2/10, respectively.
Contracting is another powerful level for managing supply continuity in 2026. Knowing your exit rights, SLA enforcement terms, and supplier failure clauses helps you understand your exposure levels. Reviewing these clauses before renewal lets you compare them to current market standards and prepare for negotiations, too.
2. Workloads keep going up while budgets go down
Last year, headcount growth wasn’t fast enough to keep up with rising workload demands. This year, headcount will shrink while workloads rise higher still.
The Hackett Group projects that procurement workloads will increase 8% in 2026 while headcount falls 0.9% and operating budgets shrink 0.4%. For reference, in 2025, there was an expected 9.8% work volume increase and a 1% increase in staffing.
As a result, there’s an expected 8.9% productivity gap from short-staffing and an 8.4% efficiency gap because of operating budget deficits. The expectation is that a projected 6.1% increase in tech spend closes both. The teams finding room to be more strategic aren’t necessarily better staffed. Instead, they’ve offloaded once-manual work that AI contracting tools can manage now, like flagging upcoming renewals before they auto-renew at terms nobody reviewed.
3. Teams expect fewer cost savings this year
Only 45% of procurement teams expect increasing savings in 2026, down from 55% last year. And the 35% of procurement teams that expect flat savings is a marked increase from 2025. Basically, fewer teams are projecting gains, and more are bracing for more of the same.
The value levers procurement leaders are counting on to drive value in 2026 are pretty traditional: supplier negotiation, strategic sourcing, category management, contract review, and demand management.
No surprises in that list, but contract review in the fourth spot is one worth a closer look. It’s less flashy than negotiation or sourcing, but it’s value you could be leaving on the table through uncollected rebates, missed price breaks, auto-renewals at unfavorable terms, and volume discounts that were written into agreements and never activated.
Traditional targets are all about savings metrics. But what happens is you’ll deliver a report that you saved $10 million this year, and your CFO turns around and says, ‘Great. Next year I want $12 million.’ But that completely misses the point. It drives the wrong behavior that focuses on short-term impact.”
Tom MillsProcurement Protagonist, Procure Bites
4. AI entered the top three procurement priorities for the first time ever
Deploying AI-enabled technology entered the Hackett Group’s top-five procurement priorities list for the first time in 2026, debuting in the third spot. AI-enabled technology also jumped from eighth place on procurement’s transformation agenda in 2025 to second place in 2026. Transforming the operating model sits at number four procurement priority this year.
On adoption, the numbers have moved fast. 71% of procurement organizations have adopted Gen AI at pilot or large-scale implementation. 56% have deployed agentic AI. Both are nearly double what the Hackett study reported last year.
The operating model is the foundational work, like figuring out who owns what, how to measure performance when AI is handling more of the transactional work, and how the function explains its value when the traditional metrics don’t tell the full story. The Hackett study flags this as one of the highest-priority but lowest-maturity areas on the agenda. Organizations know they need to rethink the model; most just haven’t worked out how yet.
The number one thing I’ve seen people get wrong is underestimating the importance of having the right foundation in place. Tech is part of the solution. I always recommend addressing the fundamentals first.
Tom MillsProcurement Protagonist, Procure Bites
Contract management is where the two priorities tend to converge. 49% of organizations are actively piloting or implementing AI for contract management, the leading use case across all procurement AI applications in the Hackett study. Contracting is a natural fit for AI because the data is already structured, the documents are the source of record, and the outcomes are easy to measure. Ironclad’s State of AI in Procurement report found that procurement teams using AI during contracting rate its impact at 8.24/10.
5. Many teams have tried AI, but fewer have scaled it
43% of organizations are actively pursuing AI-enabled technology deployment, but only 12% have reached large-scale implementation.
Results from teams further along in AI adoption are encouraging, with procurement teams reporting productivity increases of 9.7% and cycle-time savings of 9.3% from AI adoption.
Gen AI and agentic AI lead in usage, though they’re still mostly in pilot.59% of organizations have Gen AI in pilot, and 43% have agentic AI in the same stage. Large-scale deployment is much smaller, with 12% of GernAI and 13% of agentic AI.
Not all AI types are delivering equally. More teams say Gen AI and NLP met or exceeded their expectations than any other AI type—70% and 72%, respectively. Fewer teams say the same about predictive AI and computer vision, even as both are attracting significant planned investment over the next three years.
Our State of AI in Procurement research found that contracting AI delivers the most consistent returns. Finance teams rate AI-generated contract insights at 9.2/10, technology teams rate contract compliance monitoring at 8.8/10, and more cautious adopters like healthcare and manufacturing put contract expiration tracking and supplier commitment management at the top of their lists. Measurable impact matters when you’re figuring out where to commit beyond a pilot.
6. What the business expects from procurement has changed
The Hackett study also took time to zoom out from procurement alone and ask about the broader business objectives for this year.
72% will place a high priority on enhancing customer satisfaction, and 50% cite cybersecurity as a major concern for 2026. While those goals traditionally fall outside of the procurement wheelhouse, expectations are changing.
Acting as a strategic advisor to the business ranks number five on the 2026 procurement priorities list, and stakeholders seek support in areas including supply risk management, digital transformation, and corporate ESG objectives.
Tom Mills has written about what this looks like in practice. In his piece on the future of procurement, he describes the gap between procurement teams that wait for a call and those that are proactively surfacing risks and opportunities for the business.
Stakeholder engagement is still a challenge for many procurement teams, just to actually be involved at the right time so they can show where they add value. It’s impossible to do more with less if you’re not at the table in the first place.
Tom MillsProcurement Protagonist, Procure Bites
Being at the table earlier requires visibility into what’s happening across the supplier base on an ongoing basis. That’s harder to do without a clear picture of how existing agreements are performing.
Where to go from here
Taken together, the key procurement trends for 2026 start to paint a picture of a function having to do more with less in a more complicated environment.
The Hackett data suggests procurement leaders know this. The priorities have shifted accordingly, and tech investment is going up even as headcount and budgets go down. That’s not a coincidence.
If you’re figuring out where to start, the data is pretty consistent about where the returns are showing up. Contracting keeps coming up as the highest-value entry point because the data is already structured, the use case is proven, and getting it right tends to create the foundation that other improvements depend on.
Want to see how Ironclad helps procurement teams manage contracts, protect margins, and reduce supplier risk? Request a demo.
Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney.
