While the procurement industry is consistently evolving and shifting, 2021 begins after a truly unprecedented year. In 2020, Chief Procurement Officers and their teams were forced to face massive disruptions, extreme threats, and entirely new challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. By and large, procurement leaders worked valiantly to ensure business continuity, build supply chain resilience, and prepare their enterprises for the next economic phase. Against this backdrop, procurement has never been more important to business operations and business results. We continue with some key procurement predictions for 2021. Today, we focus on Big Data and artificial intelligence.

Prediction #1: Big Data Will Demand Big Action and Big Investment

In the “age of intelligence” nearly every aspect of the contemporary business will be tracked and monitored in some fashion. Developing an intelligent procurement operation is a marathon not a sprint. Chief Procurement Officers and their teams need to have the motivation, stamina, and long-term vision to go the distance. However, with a surplus of new data comes a dearth of real expertise in how to analyze it and extract intelligence. While many procurement executives/professionals have strong analytical capabilities, the next generation of analysis falls within the arena of “data science.” In 2021 or soon thereafter, a majority of procurement teams will soon be focused on improving these capabilities.

Big Prediction #2: AI Begins to Make a Major Impact on Procurement Value

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most disruptive technological innovations to hit the business community since perhaps the introduction of the commercial internet in the early 1990s. AI has a rich legacy as both an academic discipline and a continuously-evolving set of autonomous and self-learning operating systems whose development spans the better part of a century. It is simultaneously one of the most widely lauded, feared, and misunderstood phenomena of the contemporary business environment, representing significant opportunity for many knowledge workers and significant peril for many others. AI has quickly emerged as a core component in the development of next-generation supply management technologies, including eSourcing and advanced sourcing, eProcurement, contract management, and spend analytics.

2021 will be a historic year for AI-driven procurement solutions and those that use them. Keep an eye on these tools!

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