Every summer, we embark on a listening tour of Procurement Leaders’ CPO community as part of our work in developing the product and community theme for the year ahead.
These are forward-looking conversations, progressive in nature and designed to challenge both our thinking and that of our members.
Throughout the summer, we’ve spoken at length to more than 50 of our CPO members to understand their visions for the future of the function, as well as some of the concerns they might have about fulfilling them.
As a result, our 2027 product and community theme will be launched in the coming weeks and will help steer our community conversations, member collaborations and thought leadership over the next 12 to 18 months. But before the grand reveal, I thought it was worth sharing a few thoughts on the back of those discussions here.
First, our members are thinking well beyond procurement in terms of how they measure success and functional impact. CPOs are looking at how they contribute to revenue generation through innovation, drive competitive advantage through antifragile strategies and are adopting concepts such as how they maximise their “return on supplier investments”.
At the same time, they are preparing for a future in which procurement becomes increasingly blended with the business and where functional boundaries become more blurred. Such an evolution will allow for more agile, consumer-centric decisions but may also introduce risks regarding procurement’s future strategic relevance.
Naturally, the adoption of new technologies is front of mind, as is the development of people to help manage the growing complexities of what procurement has become – and how it will continue to evolve.
Members can access the full report, but one of the main insights I can share here is that for the first time in 15 years, digitalisation is viewed by CPOs as a more important enabler of value than people.
It may have been a close call, but it seems the robots are taking over already.
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