Max HenryFounder & Executive Director, Global Supply Chain Council (GSCC) · Founder & Executive Director at Global Supply Chain Council (GSCC)

AI Procurement: Automate Smarter, Not Harder! #shorts

14 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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In this short, the speaker argues that applying AI to procurement should start with first‑principles questioning of whether a given process should exist at all, rather than simply automating legacy workflows. Using the example of invoice handling, they illustrate how early solutions involved uploading invoices for extraction, which later evolved to extracting data directly from email. The speaker warns that automating outdated processes can embed inefficiencies, and suggests that AI implementations should consider redesigning or eliminating the process entirely before adding automation, to avoid propagating root issues.

Chapters

And second approach is like what we try to follow basically is like, do we need this process in like first principles thinking? Do we need processes at all? Like what I'm saying is like first technology emerged, like there was like where people were uploading invoices and it was getting extracted and it was on a system. And then it got, okay, why not we extract directly from the email? And so it's the same thing. What I'm trying to say is like sometimes in procurement, when you look at AI and you want to automate the process, you might be automating old process and maybe it needs to be redesigned when you integrate to remove process itself. So you throw AI and so you get to next step. So it's more of a, we think, does this process can be completely replaced or we can cause a root issue before automating this process?