Our new weekly series brings industry insights around Ardent Partners’ AI Rising 2026: The State of Procurement AI report, sponsored by ORO Labs and Fairmarkit, examining how CPOs and senior procurement leaders are navigating the AI transformation, and revealing where AI adoption is accelerating, the challenges that remain, and the strategies separating today’s leaders from tomorrow’s laggards.
In Part Nine this week, we explore how procurement’s next AI challenge is determining where intelligence can be applied and scaled after the foundational infrastructure is in place. Today, adoption is concentrated in areas such as spend analytics, invoice processing, and supplier discovery, where AI is improving data quality, visibility, decision-making, and operational speed.
Procurement AI in Action
If the first step in the journey is building the infrastructure, the next step is determining how and where intelligence will be applied, and at what scale.
Like Dorothy’s visit to Oz, the CPO’s journey is not about discovering something entirely new, but about recognizing and activating capabilities that were always within reach. Along the way, Dorothy encounters companions in search of intelligence, empathy, and courage. Procurement’s AI journey reflects a similar progression. It begins with the search for insight, expands through human-centered decision-making, and accelerates as organizations gain the confidence to act.
Today, AI adoption within procurement remains concentrated in a handful of core areas. Spend analytics is one of the most prominent, in no small part because its core tools fall under the umbrella of AI. Here, AI is used to classify transactions, identify patterns, and surface insights that would be difficult to detect manually. It improves data quality, enhances visibility, and enables more informed decision-making. Like spend analysis, invoice processing leverages the older type of AI and is, therefore, more prominent in its use today.
Supplier discovery and onboarding is another area of active deployment. AI can scan vast data sets to identify potential suppliers, assess risk factors, and pre-populate onboarding information. It reduces the time required to bring new suppliers into the ecosystem and improves the quality of the data captured during that process. This is particularly valuable in complex supply environments where speed and accuracy are both critical.
Access your free copy of AI Rising 2026: The State of Procurement AI to discover how procurement leaders are adopting AI, evaluate your organization’s readiness against current market trends, and gain practical insights for building a more intelligent, AI-enabled procurement function.
