If I were to pick one term that’s cropped up more than most over the past few weeks it would have to be the strangely satisfying word, “agentic”.
Although the pedants among us would point out that agentic isn’t actually a word at all, it has still been used liberally across many interactions in the Procurement Leaders community of late – not least the World Procurement Congress and AI Forum in London earlier this month.
To give it context, “agentic AI” describes AI systems that are designed to make decisions and achieve complex goals with only limited human supervision. In short, agentic AI is a proactive model of artificial intelligence rather than a reactive model that requires user input, such as with generative AI.
At our AI Forum, John Ferry, global innovation and transformation lead at Accenture (pictured above), talked about the autonomous procurement organisation and how AI is rapidly advancing from traditional predictive analytics and generative AI towards a more autonomous form that involves systems that can make decisions and pursue goals without continuous human oversight, for example.
This idea is nothing new. In 2008, Professor Richard Lamming depicted a vision of procurement’s future as being a room containing a black box, a buyer and a dog. The black box would perform all the complex duties of procurement while the buyer would ensure the black box was switched on, kept cool and maintained. Rather more importantly, he or she would also feed the dog.
The dog, meanwhile, was there to snarl at the buyer (who had since been handed the new title of caretaker) if they ever tried to switch the black box off.
We are closer than ever to this potential end game, one where machines can carry out both the fundamentals and the intricacies of the role.
A panel debate at the AI Forum explored this hypothesis in detail, with individuals arguing for and against the question of whether procurement could ever be fully autonomous. Only one-quarter of the audience (voting via QR code) voted “for” the motion, which means that either three-quarters of procurement professionals are in denial or I’ve been taking buzzwords too seriously.
But, in all seriousness, agentic AI raises fascinating questions about the future of the function, what operating models will soon look like and how CPOs allocate human resources in the procurement function. Or, what’s left of it.
To receive weekly insights from the Procurement Leaders community, sign up to the CPO Crunch newsletter using the link at the top of this page.
