Key takeaways
- Start small with low-risk, high-value applications. Focus on tactical, transactional processes that don’t require extensive cross-functional alignment – like contract management, spend analysis, and report generation. Build credibility through measurable wins before expanding to more complex use cases.
- Contracting is procurement’s biggest AI opportunity. 80% of procurement teams already use AI for contracts with an 8.3/10 benefit score. AI excels at tracking supplier commitments, monitoring compliance, extracting key terms, and managing renewals – making it the most consistent winner across all industries.
- Think of AI as augmenting different roles. Katie from Anthropic shared a powerful framework: use AI as a consultant (strategic advice), teammate (vendor negotiations), analyst (metrics and reporting), and agent (autonomous task completion). This makes AI adoption more manageable and practical.
- Build a culture of AI knowledge sharing. Success comes from sharing learnings across functions – what recruiting learns about AI for resume screening can inform contract screening. Create internal networks to exchange use cases and best practices.
- Focus on enabling strategic work, not replacing people. AI handles the “boring parts” – manual data entry, report generation, invoice matching – freeing procurement professionals to focus on relationship building, strategic sourcing, and business partnering. As Mathew noted, this positions procurement as a competitive advantage.
Interested in seeing how how AI can help with your specific procurement challenges? Talk to one of our digital contracting specialists and get a custom demo.
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