Procurement is going through a bit of an identity crisis.
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Over the last few years, AI has gone from buzzword to boardroom priority. Everyone’s talking about how it’s going to transform how we work—but when it comes to procurement, we’re still seeing a gap between the promise and the reality.
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That gap? It’s not about whether the tech works. It’s about whether people trust it enough to let it work.
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We hosted a small, no-slides Salon recently to talk through that exact tension. Around the table were Spendflo’s CEO Sid Sridharan, CRO Rajiv Ramanan, Director of Finance Varun DB, VP of Procurement Strategy, Jimmy Hallsworth—and a few of us on the marketing and ops side. What started as a conversation about AI ended up becoming a conversation about trust, talent, and what it really means to build an AI-native organization.
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Here’s what stuck with me.
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AI isn’t the issue. Confidence is.

Sid said something that’s still bouncing around in my head:
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“AI is helping systems evolve from being just systems of record to systems of intelligence. Unstructured inputs—like contracts—can now flow directly into insight.” - Siddharth Sridharan, CEO, Spendflo
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That should feel like a breakthrough, right? And yet, Jimmy pointed out the very real hesitation leaders still feel when AI enters the room:
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“AI is a tool, not a negotiator. It lacks empathy, nuance, emotional intelligence.”- Jimmy Hallsworth, VP Procurement Strategy, Spendflo
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The room nodded. Because while AI can pull benchmark data, summarize a contract, or flag unusual terms—no CFO is ready to let it lead a $2M renewal.
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That hesitation isn’t fear—it’s pragmatism. And it’s exactly why confidence matters more than capability.
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Dirty data is AI’s silent killer

Varun, who heads our finance org, having seen his fair share of procurement cycles—nailed the core problem:
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“Data input validation is make-or-break. Garbage in = garbage out.” - Varun D B, Director of Finance, Spendflo
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We all talk about “bad data” like it’s a tech issue. But in procurement, it’s often a process issue—contracts stored in seven different places, teams logging usage manually, suppliers coded inconsistently. AI can’t fix that. It just exposes it faster.
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McKinsey’s research backs this up: Over a fifth of procurement leaders say their data infrastructure is still “low maturity.” Even those who’ve invested in automation often find themselves doing cleanup downstream.
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If we want to trust AI, we need to start by trusting our inputs.
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The biggest shift? Rethinking talent, not tools
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Rajiv brought in a more provocative point:
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“AI will decimate repetitive and entry-level roles. If we don’t reskill, we’ll face a talent vacuum.” - Rajiv Ramanan, CRO, Spendflo
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This one hit a nerve.
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We all know junior roles are changing. Intake forms, triage, chasing up license counts—those tasks are being automated away. But if we’re not intentional about how we grow the next layer of procurement talent, we’ll be left with leaders who skipped the reps.

And yet, there’s a flip side. The World Economic Forum says 59% of workers will need reskilling. That’s a challenge—but it’s also an invitation. If we play it right, AI doesn’t hollow out teams—it levels them up.
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The Procurement Engineer is coming‍

We spent a good chunk of the conversation talking about what a future procurement role actually looks like.

Sid threw out a phrase that stuck:
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“They’re not admins—they’re orchestrators of AI-driven workflows.” - Siddharth Sridharan, CEO, Spendflo
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That’s when someone said: “We need Procurement Engineers.”

Not another layer of management. But a new type of operator—someone who understands data structure, can work with copilots, and still knows when to jump into a negotiation with context and conviction.
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It’s not just rebranding. It’s rethinking what procurement does in an AI-led world.
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What actually gets you from chaos to confidence?

All the tech in the world won’t help if you don’t trust what it’s doing. Here’s what we agreed every org needs to build that trust:
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1. A clean foundation. Tag your top 50 contracts. Standardize supplier data. Stop relying on tribal knowledge.
   
   
2. A governance layer. Get legal, IT, and finance aligned on what AI is allowed to touch (and when).
   
   
3. An internal playbook. Don’t just train AI—train your team. Rotate procurement folks through data and prompt-writing sessions.
   
   
4. Metrics that matter. Don’t just track savings. Track trust—model accuracy, auditability, and stakeholder confidence.
   
   

Because when confidence goes up, everything else follows: faster cycles, better decisions, less fire-fighting.
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So where does this leave us?‍

Procurement doesn’t need another dashboard. It needs a reset.

A mindset shift—from admin to strategy, from tools to systems, from AI as a helper to AI as a co-pilot you trust.
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At Spendflo, we’ve been building for this exact moment. We combine structured procurement data, embedded workflows, and human-in-the-loop copilots to help finance and procurement teams scale with confidence. But honestly, what we’re building only matters because of what’s coming: a new generation of procurement teams ready to own their outcomes—and their data.
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And if that sounds like you, let’s talk.