Procurement at an Existential Crossroads: Adapting to AI or Being Left Behind

The technology is only going to get better. And as agentic AI continues to improve, it's going to start taking on more and more and more activities. The question then becomes, how do you ensure the procurement continues to play a meaningful role in that process? Well, the only way you can do that is if procurement actively takes ownership of the kinds of issues that are uniquely human.

On this episode of Executive Edge, Greg is joined by Omar Abdullah, a global business leader with over 35 years of experience and co-founder of the SmartCube. Omar discusses the future of procurement in an AI-driven world, his newly launched venture Procuria, and what practitioners must do to stay relevant as the profession faces an existential turning point. The first and foremost thing I will say to any practitioner, leader or otherwise, is begin to use these tools. If you don't use these tools, you will never understand.

And don't wait for perfect, right? That's the point of your experience in judgment, is that you retain agency to accept or reject what it's telling you. Hello, and welcome to this episode of Tenzing's Executive Edge podcast. My guest today is Omar Abdullah, a seasoned global business leader and former colleague of mine who has more than 35 years of experience spanning roles in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific regions.

An MBA graduate from the University of Michigan, Omar has held leadership roles at AT Kearney, Warner Lambert, and the Perrier Group before co-founding the SmartCube. He bootstrapped that company from the early 2000s into one of the world's leading procurement intelligence and analytics platforms, culminating in its successful sale to W&S in 2022. With over three decades of deep experience partnering with procurement leaders worldwide, Omar has recently launched a multimedia content and advisory venture called Procuria, which we will discuss in our conversation today.

Hi, Omar, and thank you for joining me on the podcast today. Hi, Greg. It's exciting to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Thanks for having me on. You bet. Yeah, it's great to see you again and I always enjoy our conversation. So before we get into the sort of the theme of this, which we're really going to look at future-proofing procurement, I should have mentioned that in my opening.

Really, how do you future-proof the procurement practitioner in an AI world? Right? So that's going to be the big theme, but before we go there, if you could share some of your background, quickly walk through your background and give the audience a sense of your story, where'd you come from, your qualifications and accomplishments before we move into the meat of the menu here. Thanks.

Sure, sure. Gosh, I'm trying to think of how far back I go. So I was born in Pakistan, grew up in Hong Kong, spent a good chunk of my life there. It's funny because I used to say I spent most of my life in Hong Kong, but actually I've now spent most of my life here in the US, but I did grow up in Hong Kong.

I moved here to do my MBA at Michigan, worked at AT Kearney for almost a decade after graduating from Michigan. I did a whole bunch of different things from strategy to operations, to organization, to restructuring work all over the world. Of course, worked a lot in procurement while I was there as well. And then in the early 2000s, I left to start the SmartCube with a couple of other folks and really spent the next 20 years building that organization and doing a couple of different things.

One, really helping to center it as a procurement intelligence and analytics business, really focused on helping procurement teams all across the world get better insights, better analytics, and make better decisions. And then from a business perspective, really growing it from a, what was initially a services business to by the time we sold it to WNS into a hybrid platform and services business or a combination of tech and custom capabilities, custom services. So that was fantastic.

I mean, as I've told many folks, I mean, that was pretty much the work of my life, so to speak, all absorbing, all encompassing, but yeah, I've been dabbling in the, or more than dabbling in the procurement space now for a good three decades, so much like you. I know we we've seen, we've seen the old days and we've seen kind of how it's grown and how it's developed and to where it is today. So exciting times, exciting times. Yeah, sure.

I mean, if you think about our, our lifespans in the procurement world, right. How much has changed with the advent of the internet and now with the advent of a gen AI and agentic AI, and it's just, it's just tremendous. The amount of change that's happened in business in general, but especially to the procurement function, I think is in particular, been, been really disrupted a couple of times now during the time we've been working in it. So it's been a interesting and exciting place to be.

So the theme we're going to talk about today is really about feature proofing the procurement practitioner. Will there even be any of them in a post AI type of a world, right? We always think there's going to be a human in a loop. I think you and I both share that belief, but that's where I want to go.

And, and really, I know you've put some thought into it with your new venture Procuria into thinking about what changes for the role of the practitioner in, in an AI embedded sort of world of procurement. And, and I think let's start out with what do you see as changing in terms of procurement? I think you said it's radically changing. So I want to see how you see it changing in this AI, AI world that we're in.

Yeah, look, I think we're at a pretty consequential, I'll go out on a little bit of a limb and say existential point in the development of procurement, you know, what we're seeing with not just ProcureTech and SAS, which, which we've been seeing now for, I mean, literally since the nineties, but in earnest, if you talk about kind of a lot of the, what, what in our modern consciousness we think of is, is ProcureTech, that's the last decade to decade and a half that we've seen this emergence, this incredible number of great companies come up.

And then in the last several years with AI and Gen AI in particular being incorporated into all of this, we're at a really, really interesting stage because we are at a point and by the way, I'm going to come back to this point on being existential because that's just not, not just me saying that there's a number of practitioners who are saying that, but, but fundamentally from a technology perspective, where we're at now is we have technology that isn't just simply taking care of the automation, the transactional routine stuff that, you know, none of us ever wanted to do and taking it over, but it's, it's doing so, and it's doing so at speed as better and better technologies and startups come out.

But we're also seeing an interesting time where if you think about the traditional pyramid of activities that make up any function of procurement in particular, there's sort of transactional work, there's a sort of cognitive decision support work where you're doing synthesis and analysis bringing things together and really making some, some, some, some decisions off the back of that. And then there's the strategic stuff, right? The top of the pyramid, which is the setting a strategy, the aligning with the overall corporate vision, et cetera.

What we've been seeing over the last decade is if you look at that pyramid, the bottom of that pyramid ProcureTech was always going to tackle, right? But it was doing it not as fast as we're seeing it now. Right now with agentic AI, we're seeing an acceleration there. It's not, these tools aren't perfect.

So I'm not suggesting that we're ready to go, but it's taking over a bunch of different activities, even today. And so that is going to happen, but it's just, and it's going to happen much faster than we think. But the interesting thing about what's happening with AI is it's actually taking a lot of work from the middle of the pack as well, right? So if you think about it, a junior analyst, a sourcing analyst would develop a supplier profile.

They do a set of risk analyses. They would look at various reports and pull that together to really make sense of whether it's a supplier or a category or ideation around what a particular sourcing strategy ought to be. And now machines are doing that for us. They're not doing it perfectly, but they're doing it pretty well and they're getting better and better and better.

And so we're seeing that pyramid radically shift. We're going to see the bottom layer go. We're going to see a good chunk of the middle layer go as well. And so what does that mean?

That means procurement is going to get pushed even harder to show its value. And if you think about it, pick a timeframe, two years, five years, 10 years, whatever that timeframe is, the function is going to look radically different. Now there's a caveat here, which I'll come to, but the function is going to look radically different. You know, we're past the point of peak employment in traditional procurement roles, but we will see new roles there as well.

But the future of procurement organization is going to be smaller. It's going to be much more higher caliber, much more integrated and aligned with what the business wants to do and overall corporate vision and strategy, if you will. And it's going to drive towards better outcomes and more tangible outcomes. So that's where we are given the development of the technology, but also aligning with things that you and I have seen over the last several decades, which is increasing caliber and sophistication of procurement professionals coming into the function.

And now they're being aided by these amazing tools. It's going to look radically different. Pick again, as I said, pick a timeframe, five years or 10 years, whatever it might be, so it's an incredible time to be in procurement. Now the caveat is this, if the function doesn't transform itself, meaning if the people don't transform themselves to take advantage of this opportunity of being higher value, then what's going to happen is CFOs are essentially going to say, well, if the work that's being done is no better than what a machine will do, which is, i.

e., collate facts, synthesize them, give me a set of outputs and just drive it forward, then I'm going to let the machines do it. And so this is the point about being existential. And I'm not the only one saying this, but practitioners have said this as well, which is if we don't show our value and really show the tangible impact that the function can make, the function won't exist in 10 years time, it'll exist in some form or another, but it won't exist in the way that we think about it today.

And for me, I see that as a fundamental loss for the corporation because procurement does a lot where it understands the stakeholder. It understands the nuances of the organization. It is able to translate a lot of those aspects together through better judgment and insight and knowledge around its priorities to drive better value, right? So we cannot afford to lose that and we cannot afford to not do that.

Now, the issue, which is the basis of procuring and kind of why I started this was, was a good chunk of practitioners aren't ready for that, right? They're not ready. And those numbers, and these are numbers that I hear from practitioners all the time, somewhere between 60 to 80% of procurement practitioners aren't ready for that future. So how do we get them there?

What does that mean to get them ready for that? And that's, those are the themes that I'm exploring through Procuria to really try and shed more light into this and hopefully help to begin taking procurement practitioners along that journey to get to that future. Does that make sense? It totally does.

I think one thing you said early on about the pyramid, right, with all the transactional activities, sort of the execution, but you know, still some decision making in that middle and then the top, the strategic part, I'd say that AI is making its way all the way to the top. It's just not maybe as, as penetrated if you can there, right? So yeah, we can, we can turn stuff on lights out on transactions, right? If you set the right business rules.

That's been around for a while with our, with our PA in the middle, I think it can help accelerate things. But I think at the very top, like I would think of as strategy, I think of category managers, right? And the information that your old company, the SmartCube used to provide. I was psyched when we at W&S acquired the SmartCube because I said, now we're delivering on the promise.

We're going to help the category manager be the most strategic person by providing them with the sort of information and context that they need to, to, you know, develop smart category strategies, interact with the business, and really be seen as valuable to the business. I think AI is, is helping to, you know, provide that information to them. You know, it's, you still need the person. I still think you need the person to interface with the business.

Yeah. That's gotta be a key skill. I think you're going to tell me we have to maintain, if not, I'm, I'm, I'm going to be scared, but I'm going to say, you know, I'm going to say that, you know, that AI is getting, getting everywhere, you know, through the, through that pyramid, if we go back to that pyramid analogy, and it's just, it's just the level of penetration is different, the level of utility is different, I think, at each, at each one of those places in the pyramid. Yeah.

Is that fair? Completely agree. Completely agree. And in fact, you know, if I were to oversimplify it, I'd say that spectrum, um, to use inelegant terms, runs from AI being a, there's got to be a better word than this, but replacer of work, uh, to being an enabler of work.

And I think the further you go up, it becomes more of an enabler. It should be, uh, but it depends on what your objectives are, right? If you're less farsighted about the, the role of procurement, let's put it that way, I say it nicely, um, you would say, well, I can do a lot of these things right up to the top in terms of being a replacer of work, right up to the top. A replacer of individuals right to the top as well.

But, but you're right. It, it, it's, it's un, uh, it's unavoidable. You know, I use this term all the time. I say, you know, post AI world.

And somebody once said to me, well, what is a post AI world? When are we going to get there? And my view is, you know, we need to stop thinking about getting there. We are there.

We're not in that post AI world of, uh, gosh, this is going to date me, the Jetsons. Um, but, but, um, I, I wonder how many of the audience won't even get that reference, but we'll, we'll, we'll find out. You can, they can, they can email us and tell us, but, but it's not about the, you know, reaching a point where there's some utopia of technological perfection and everything is integrated and embedded in. That's not the point.

My point is AI is here today. It is delivering real value today. Sure. It doesn't have the full on agentic autonomy that, you know, is hyped about so much everywhere, but it's doing things.

It's helping us do better work today. So as far as I'm concerned, we are in a post AI world. We need to reckon with these tools as, uh, as imperfect as they are and recognize that for the areas where they are really, really good, start incorporating that into the work that we do and not just dabbling in it, but incorporating them into our workflows of how we get our work done and then. As they get better and better, they'll enable us even better, even, um, more strongly as we go forward.

And, uh, and, and so that's kind of how I sort of think about this is we are in that world today. And it is here. We need to start to grapple with it. And we need to start incorporating that into the work that we're doing on a daily basis.

Make it part of our routine. That's how we're going to continue to skill ourselves up and get more value and deliver more value for the organization. Right, right. Now, um, you've taken the position and put forth the proposition, I would say maybe that, uh, expectations are changing, uh, for procurement and I think they have been in terms of value delivery, the expectation of value delivery, not just savings, but help us get the most value for the dollars that we spend on goods and services with third parties.

Right. Um, but the, the, the expectations you you've mentioned this a few times in your writings, uh, recent writings that they're changing and many of today's practitioners just aren't prepared for what's coming and that's because their roles were designed for a pre AI world. So let's go down this one, uh, down this hole for a while together here. Um, they're shifting faster than the skills, incentives, and operating models can cope.

So what's, what's driving the shift in expectations? Is it just because the technology's there, uh, that, that they're saying, wait, you should be able to do more. I'd say it's multifaceted, but it is certainly accelerated by the promise of the technology. So I'll make that distinction between the technology versus the promise of the technology.

And in, in, in some areas they overlap, but in others they don't. But, but the way I sort of look at it is this, the demands and expectations of procurement have been, um, increasing, uh, in an accelerating fashion for gosh, probably two ish plus three ish decades, right, right from the early days, um, in the eighties and nineties, when we recognize that every dollar that procurement saves goes right to the bottom line and then you apply your multiple if you're a public company and that's shareholder value right off the bat versus how much do you have to sell to realize that same dollar of shareholder value, right?

Uh, so, so it started a while back. Since then the world's only gotten more, uh, competitive. Um, our markets are far, uh, more competitive. Um, our supply chains are far more global, uh, and much more interdependent.

There are many more risks to consider and organizations have grown substantially. As a result, you have these external mandates that have been coming in, which is, you know, more competitive. Um, we were dealing with more complexity. We have to get all of that under control, right?

And, and procurement has been, uh, pushed to think about these issues for decades. You layer over that, the increasing recognition and the higher caliber of talent that's come into procurement. And the C-suite is basically saying, okay, I get it. You can, you can really deliver some value.

So let's start seeing a lot of that value. And of course that comes to the fore when you have disasters like the, um, uh, the great recession, the global financial crisis of the late 2000s, COVID of course, but any other, you don't want to look at it on that kind of scale, any natural disaster that takes place, procurement gets a call to say, help us manage continuity, help us assure production, help us keep moving the ball forward. So all of these aspects are playing in, um, uh, from a, from an external mandate perspective and from an internal C-suite perspective, what the technology is now doing is it saying, Hey, by the way, a lot of this stuff is doable by the machines, right?

And, um, uh, practically there's a lot of truth to that. Uh, the technology is only going to get better. And as agentic AI continues to improve, um, it's going to start taking on more and more and more activities. The question then becomes how do you ensure the procurement continues to play a meaningful role in that process?

Well, the only way you can do that is a procurement actively takes ownership of the kinds of issues, uh, that are uniquely human, right? So to go back to the point, you and I both believe that the human has to be at the center of all of this stuff, right? Technology is fantastic. We should absolutely leverage it.

We should invest in it. But at the end of the day, you know, we're not going to ask the technology that why they made that decision. We're going to get asked, why'd you make that decision? Right.

We got to own it. We have to have agency in that process. Um, and so, so, so I think the technology is accelerating a lot of this and, and it's forcing the hand, if you will, of a lot of senior executives to drive this forward, to, to, to, to demand more of this value from procurement and therefore it's incumbent on us to take that ownership, to take this as an opportunity to really change the game for the function and frankly, for the existence of the function over the longterm.

Great. Okay. So let's look at what does one do in such a situation? So we're talking about the practitioner, the person that's working in procurement, um, pick whatever level you want, Omer, or multiple levels, if you will.

And, uh, you know, somebody comes to you and says, Hey man, okay. I see what's happening here. I understand the shift is coming. Uh, I just don't know what to do first or what to do next.

And do you have any advice to help me, uh, sort of survive and thrive in this new world that AI is going to present? So let me break this into a couple of different parts, right? So, um, what I can say, the most practical thing that I'll say, whether you're a leader of a procurement function or whether you're a practitioner, right, in the function, um, is start using these tools, just start getting involved, right, and start dabbling in them, seeing what the opportunities. And, and look, there's a ton of startups that are out there and their past startup, many of them are, who are already leveraging procure AI in procurement, um, workflows and activities.

Start learning from them, start talking to them, understand what they're trying to get done, understand how they're pushing the ball forward. And that's understanding it from a, uh, uh, from an organization and startup landscape. But even short of that, there's a lot of things you can begin to do today, right? So, um, basic things you're about to go into a supplier communication.

Well, go, by the way, pay 20 bucks a month for the subscriptions to ChatGPT and Claude. I'm just picking the most obvious examples and you know what? Use the better model. So in, in ChatGPT, it's the thinking model and Claude, it's the opus as of recording of this date, uh, model.

Who knows it'll change tomorrow, probably. But use those better models and ask it to give you a profile of the supplier. Ask it to help you assess that supplier relative to its competition. Help it to, uh, build a risk profile of some sort of that supplier.

Help it to, uh, draft key talking points of the kinds of issues you're going to be talking to the supplier about. Of course, manage your confidential information, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Goes without saying there's got to be a bunch of guardrails, um, around this. And I write about that on, on my, uh, on Procura.

com as well. But start using this stuff for actual workflow activity. If it's not a supplier meeting, use it from a risk analysis perspective. You know, there's, there's a ton of use cases that are out there, but start to use it.

You can't read and learn this stuff. You can, you can only do and learn this stuff. So if you're a practitioner, start dabbling and start using those tools today. Right.

But use, but pay for it. It's a difference between the free stuff and the stuff you pay for. Um, and use the better models, even within what you're paying for. If you're a leader in the space, start giving your folks the encouragement and guidance to begin dabbling with this.

Ask them to try these tools out. Um, ask them to document what, how they're using it and what value they're getting and what, where they're not getting value. Um, above all, ask them and, and counsel them to retain their cognitive agency. That's a term I'm going to use regularly.

Um, as I write about this stuff, you own the output you own. So think about what comes out of that machine. Think about what that is. Content is telling you and then translate it and reject the parts that don't align with your judgment and your own, uh, uh, experience, but start dabbling with that stuff.

So give your people the freedom to do it, communicate the wins that come out of that, share that across the board and, and really begin to use it. So, so the first and foremost thing I will say to any practitioner leader or otherwise is begin to use these tools. If you don't use these tools, you will never understand them. You will never understand them and don't wait for perfect, right?

That's the point of your experience in judgment is that you retain agency to accept or reject what it's telling you. So that's the first and foremost thing. The other thing I would say is if you're a leader, you really have to think more holistically about the deployment of these sorts of tools within your organization. And that's of course, the technology piece.

One of the posts I've got on, on the, on the site on Procura.com provides a four point sort of model to think about these things, right? There's the technology, which you have to consider and understand, but that's one part of the overall picture. The second piece is what I call focus, meaning how, where do you orient your thinking and your focus?

You have to think about outcomes. You have to think about value. In other words, yes, you know, there's the whole thing that procurement, we think about process standardization and we think about compliance and those are important things, right? So I don't, I don't discount any of that, but at the end of the day, we're really about outcomes.

And if we have to mess with the process a little bit, painting accountability, of course, right? And ownership, but mess with the process or accelerate the process in order to get to a better outcome, think in that way. So orient your focus. So think about the tech, orient your focus towards outcomes.

The third piece is if you're a leader, think about the operating model, right? How do you rethink the operating model, um, to, to really account for these sorts of tools? So think about, um, everything from whether you insource to whether you outsource, do you make versus buy? And I think you have to think a lot more flexibly about those sorts of things.

Think about what you locate close to the center of procurement versus the stuff you let the businesses handle. And then you can craft, um, an organization or operating model that makes, uh, that takes advantage of the kinds of opportunities these tools offer. And so the last thing I would say, so tech, focus, operating model, but the last thing is around mindset. How do you change the mindset of your people to really account for this?

I talked about outcome orientation as being an important one, but the other three that I sort of throw out there is if you think about people centric skills, how do you move from being a process administrator to being more of an orchestrator of outcomes? There's a lot that's packed into that word of being an orchestrator of outcome of that phrase of orchestrator of outcomes, because what it suggests is you can think holistically about the problem. You can understand the piece parts that are there, and then you can pull together the relevant elements that are needed in order to meet the outcome you're going after.

So that's really essential to be able to have that skill. And, and that's what, why I say 60 to 80% of folks, I I'm not sure I'm ready for that, right? Because they have been taught to be like this, right? Siloed in terms of what we do.

And look, I get why that's how the function has grown over the decades. And that's how the enabling and supporting technologies have supported us in doing that sort of work, but we've got to start thinking differently now. So I would say being an orchestrator, having much deeper business acumen, not just P&L literacy, but I'm saying the value chain and how you think about how you rethink about that. And then last but not least is a lot of these human leverage skills, right?

Which is all the soft stuff like, you know, relationship development, stakeholder management. How do you communicate? How do you build a better narrative? How do you think more creatively, right?

Soft skills, but so essential, so essential to performance. So it's, there's a lot to take on. There's a lot to think about, right? But from everything to the technology, to the focus, to the operating model, to the mindset, and then the skills that you need to be able to execute against that, right?

As a, as a human being, as a practitioner around orchestration, around business acumen, and then human leverage or mindset issues, those are really critical aspects. So there's a lot to take on, but long story short, if that's all like just too much at this point in time, that's fine. Just start dabbling in these tools and dabbling intentionally from a workflow point of view. How can I take this and how can I use it to replace a set of tasks that I no longer need to do, but whose output I will evaluate and I will judge to make sure that it is on point.

Start doing that and you'll start getting value ASAP. Good. I'm going to play a little bit of that back to you here, because I think you touched on a lot of key points. I always like to dig the gold out of that and bring forth the insights.

So one is people should learn to use the tools. They should actively be working with the tools today and not so much experimenting, but just understand how they work. Because I think it's definitely one of those tools where you intend to use it for one thing and then you realize, oh, wait, I can do this with it as well, right? And it can help me get to this answer.

But understanding how the underlying tech works, the logic of it, the utility of it, the value of it, the relative amount of hallucination of it that you have to check against, knowing the tool is one of the key things and being familiar with the tool. And then I think the rest of everything else you said, Omer, was really all the stuff the tool can't do that a human needs to be able to do if they want to be a strategic contributor in an organization are the things to work on.

100%. Understand the business context. So really understand why is the IT shift, everything to the cloud in the next six months, so important, right? Why is that context so important?

Understand what they're trying to accomplish, maybe in something, if you're on the direct materials side, with why are we trying to reduce this? Do we have margin pressure? Do we have failures in the field? You know, what is driving this, let's say, a material change that you're going to make?

Right? So you're telling, basically what you're telling the audience here is beef up and become a smarter, more strategic member of the organization, right? Because the folks that just want to move things from box A to box B and make sure any exceptions are handled and it's all neatly ticked and tied and put away, there's going to be a robot doing that. 100%.

100%. And I would even take it beyond that to say, in many organizations, we talk about, oh, if I deliver X percent savings, that's the value I brought to the table. And yes, that's never going to go away, right? That value has to be brought.

But let's expand our thinking. So when I talk about higher order value and outcomes, right, how can we accelerate the time to market for this particular product from six months down to four months, right? What do we need to do to get there? Or, let's say our organization has a new product development path that features sort of innovation as part of their core ethos, right?

So how do you do that? Well, hey, guess what? We are at a unique point when you talk about direct materials or you talk about packaging, which goes here or direct or indirect, depending on the organization. But if you take something like that, you have certain ingredients that you buy that go into a particular product that you manufacture.

You have certain types of packaging that you use that has implications both from a go-to-market, market-facing, customer-facing perspective, but also from a logistics and transportation implications perspective, right? Well, who's better suited to be able to canvas the supply base and identify where the latest innovations are taking place and where the most movement is taking place? Well, yeah, great. You know what?

We're going to go get better deals and better contracts in place and better suppliers on this particular ingredient or this particular packaging, but wouldn't it be more valuable to say, let's do those things, but wouldn't it also be valuable to say, you know, we've been using this sort of packaging, but here's a new development that's coming out on the horizon, right? We did, we used to do a chunk of this work at the SmartCube, we're on patent intellectual property research.

Who's making the innovations in this space and what are they doing and how are they applying it? Because if we can be first to market, to incorporate that, that's real end user value that we can get, or it's points of margin in terms of just more efficient transportation, as an example, right? Or lower transportation costs. So there's all sorts of values we can bring, which move us from our traditional metrics of we followed the process, we mitigated risk, we ensured compliance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to we facilitated better outcomes.

And at the end of the day, if you're a business unit, we talk about wanting a seat at the table, right? It's the most cliched phrase we hear in procurement, right? Well, how do you get a seat at the table? You get a seat at the table when the folks who are at that table that were running that table, basically say, Hey, where's the procurement person?

Let's get them in the room because every time that person's in the room, we get good ideas or it facilitates a better decision in terms of what we're trying to do. When they start saying those things, that's when we, and the only way we're going to get there is if we facilitate better outcomes and we think in terms of outcomes, right? So that to me is kind of the Holy grail that we got to keep focusing on. Right.

You said outcomes about 38 times there, I think. I lost count. No, but that is it though. I think that's the essence of it because we've talked before about the importance of context to good judgment.

If you're there just trying to drive savings because you think that's your one and only metric and that's, what's always important to the business. And that's how I get bonus. That's how I get measured. And your internal stakeholder is trying to get a marketing campaign launched because they want to take advantage of a shift in the market that's happened and you're holding them back from doing that.

You're not understanding the outcome they're trying to, they want to get to market fast, the hell with savings for right now. We'll go get those later. But right now the imperative is to get to market before our competition does so that we can grab share. And that's the context and that's the reason that people need to be oriented to business outcomes.

And I've been on the outcome preaching for about the last 10 years because I've just watched people like think that, Oh, I know what they want. They always want this. I'm like, you're not paying attention. Yeah.

Yeah. No wonder your organization's being dismissed and not getting to go to the big meeting or have that seat. Well, you're not paying attention to what your internal client is telling you is important. And until you get that ability to pull that in.

So I think what I'm hearing here for sure, and it's always good to become more knowledgeable and more broad thinking about the business, right? But, but it's never been more important maybe now because all the other stuff that you used to think it was important to worry about is going to likely be automated or taken care of by some, something else that can do it. You really need to understand what is the, the outcome the business is looking to achieve to be valuable and to, to survive and thrive and I think in this future.

Yeah. A hundred percent. And, and look, if you go back to, to, to functions that procurement has traditionally had trouble working with, right? Uh, HR benefits, legal, marketing to use, you know, the example that you, that you raised earlier, those are classic functions where, you know, as a function, we've made strides being able to better work with, but it's been hard.

And the reason it's been hard is for all of these things, which is they're saying, well, you don't understand the outcomes we're after and the entire set of variables that are needed to be thought through to get to those better outcomes. And by the way, those variables of, of, of those variables, price is just one piece of it, right? How do you think more holistically and understand it? And that's the challenge we've got to step up to right now.

We've made progress, that's for sure. But also rest assured that in every single function that's out there, there is a startup that is saying we can help you source this stuff really, really well. Right. And.

Uh, if the, if the practitioner doesn't show that insight and judgment and holistic thinking to be able to drive towards better outcomes in the context of what the corporation wants, guess what? The vendor's ready and willing to go after it. So how do you show not an ability to displace the vendor, but that you can bring that vendor in and then work with them to really create much better outcomes. Right.

Right. Again, at the end of the day, if the vendor is bringing a tech, if you're no better than the machine, there's no value, let's go with that vendor. But the combination, that's where the real impact is. For sure.

And, uh, you know, we, in, uh, in the last place we worked together, we always talked about taking that pyramid and flipping it, right. Making the people more strategic, right. One of the things you need to be more strategic is time. And we used to offer up that time by saying, let us handle these execution tasks and these, these transactional things.

We'll try to automate the daylights out of those so that you have more time to understand the business needs better, to spend more time building those relationships to, uh, developing a keen understanding of the outcomes that all your stakeholders need to drive in, in the functional areas you're supporting. Well, now if there's anything that gives you time, you know, it's AI is going to continue to contribute to that time. So eventually you have so many people with so much time, you don't need all those people.

Let's be real about it. I think you're right. We've reached peak employment already in procurement. Now it's going to, it's going to land somewhere.

And I think it lands with the people that really understand the business outcomes that really have the context in mind and know exactly what their mission is when they're working with the business to go out and, uh, and make sure, uh, you know, that, that the objectives that they're trying to accomplish are the right objectives. Yeah. A hundred percent. And the way, the way, if I was a practitioner, the way I sort of think about this is, look, we've talked about a lot of these things and some of this can, if you're, if, if you're a regular practitioner, some of it can seem pretty scary, right?

Holy crap. How do I, you know? But what you just said is, is on point, which is, this is what we've been asking for for years, which is, I don't want to do all the stuff that's down here in that pyramid. I've, you know, we've always said it, right?

We didn't, we don't want to do that work. Well, guess what? Now we have technology that, okay, in some aspects it's eliminating, in others, maybe it's not eliminating it completely, but over time it'll help, right? And all of that stuff that is, uh, fundamental firefighting, we're not going to take away all the firefighting.

That's just the nature of the beast is such that that's not going to all go away. But a lot of this stuff, we're going to get taken off our plate. So it's an opportunity. What we've always wanted is at hand.

And that's going to require us to step up and skill up and really move ourselves to that next level. And I think, I think it's a, it's a positive challenge that we have to embrace and really take forward. Yeah. No doubt about it.

That's been great. No, that's, uh, it's really helpful. I think, uh, any, any practitioners that are listening, hopefully you're able to take a lot of this away, really start, start leveling up people, um, and use the technology to help you level up. Uh, whether that's enabling you to level up or it's taking away, uh, work that's enabling you to have more time to, to really increase your skillset.

And understand, you know, what's, what's important, what does a business really need in a, in a procurement function, uh, I think is, I think is so important though, yeah, it's in, in, you know, these evolutions have happened, uh, right through the years. Right. I was listening to a podcast this morning about, you know, 90 some odd percent of people used to work in agriculture. It's I think less than 2% today.

And, uh, there's still a lot of people around, they're working on different things, right. And, uh, you know, there's, there's, it's just, uh, it's, it's shifts that happen throughout history, I think. And we're in the middle of one of those shifts or maybe not the middle yet. Uh, we're, we're still in maybe the early innings, but it's going to happen fast.

This is the fastest shift I think I've ever seen in my lifetime. Uh, and I think, uh, you know, those that are ready, those that see where it's going and do something about it are going to be better, uh, better suited to, to, you know, move on, uh, you know, with their job in this, this new paradigm, those that aren't, um, you know, that's, that's fine. Maybe they find something else to do, but, um, maybe they like all that transactional work. Uh, you know, but I think, I think that the, uh, the profession is calling for something different now and, uh, the technology is there to enable something different and, uh, it's time to get on board with that.

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. The, the, the, the profession is asking for it and the profession's customers, internal customers are asking for it too. So a hundred percent, I wholeheartedly agree.

All right. Well, you've got a lot to write about, uh, and I wish you well with, with the new venture, but thank you so much, Omer, for, for joining us today on, on the Executive Edge podcast and sharing your thoughts about, um, where these people need to go, I'm going to look forward to continuing to read, um, do you want to maybe point people, if they want to follow your stuff, obviously you're on LinkedIn, but where else can they kind of keep up with your point of view on, on AI?

Sure. So, uh, I'm on LinkedIn pretty regularly, but the, the site, if you want to go, uh, read the content and the, the, the, the information that I put out there is at Procuria.com that's P for Peter, R O Q U R I A.com.

So Procuria.com, you can go there and, uh, please subscribe to my, it's a Substack platform, but subscribe to it and, uh, you'll get them, uh, regularly. Great, great. Thank you, Omer.

Well, it's been great talking to you until next time. Uh, I look forward to, uh, keeping, keeping in touch with you and kind of watching this, uh, evolution that we're in the middle of and see where it goes. Thanks a lot. Thanks so much, Greg.

It's been great being on the show. Take care.