Remember that scene in Jurassic Park when the T-Rex is chasing the Jeep, with Dr. Ian Malcolm in the back quipping the now-famous line, “Must go faster”?
I’m sure the 1,800+ procurement professionals at the inaugural Gartner Procurement Conference in San Diego could relate.
At the keynote, I sat next to an attendee who described her average supplier onboarding time as four to six weeks.
She posed a scenario: Imagine you have a new RFP and want to include a new supplier in the process. But first, you have to onboard them. You might call it prequalification or due diligence. Now imagine an impatient stakeholder wondering what’s slowing down the RFP.
What happens? The stakeholder defaults to an incumbent supplier who is already in the system. Must go faster.
I joked with her and asked how she would feel if I told her there was a vendor in the exhibitor hall that could help her cut onboarding time to three days or less. I told her the vendor was even working on a two-minute onboarding capability. She asked if I worked for that vendor, and I replied yes.
I thought that was the end of the conversation. So imagine my pleasant surprise when I saw her stop by our booth later that afternoon.
The pain point was real enough that she was willing to brave the exhibitor floor to see if we had an answer for her. Spoiler: we do.
The Peak of Inflated Expectations
To use a Gartner term, agentic AI has reached the Peak of Inflated Expectations. During the keynote, “Empowering Procurement to Lead in the Augmented Era,” senior research director Lindsay Azim used the analogy of manufacturing replacing the water wheel with electricity.
She explained that electricity didn’t necessarily generate additional productivity if the machines inside were the same and the company still followed the same processes.
AI is the new electricity. It has the power to automate and accelerate poor processes with bad data just as much as good ones. The problem is inflated expectations.
Chief of research Ryan Polk put it a slightly different way in his presentation on the top questions procurement leaders ask about AI. He asked whether anyone in the room was doing less work now than they were ten years ago. We have access to robots, software, and other tools that make processes more efficient, but has your workload decreased? Of course not. And it won’t with AI either.
Both agree that the nature of your work will change and evolve, even if the volume does not.
apexanalytix can absolutely help you go faster and avoid the T-Rex. But in addition to using our AI-enabled applications and services, you should be thinking about what your role in procurement will look like once everything is in place. Once you can onboard suppliers in three days or less, what will you do with the extra time? Just onboard more? Or develop new skills and find new ways to create value for the business?
Emerging and Evolving Skill Sets
Gartner argues that companies should evaluate which new skills they hire and train for across AI and procurement. As mentioned above, the volume of work won’t decrease, but the work will change. Routine tasks will be automated, while tasks requiring human decision-making will remain. That calls for staff with new and enhanced skills.
Azim used the example of the Artemis II mission. Most of the flight past the moon was automated. But NASA still sent four astronauts. Why? Because the nature of their roles and the tasks they performed had changed. AI didn’t eliminate the need for human knowledge.
Gartner analyzed more than 41 million job postings from January 2023 to June 2026 to see which AI-adjacent skill sets were increasing in demand. On the technical side, automation and integration, data science, and data analytics were high on the list. On the interpersonal side, teamwork, leadership, account management, and vendor management ranked highly.
What does this mean for procurement professionals? Human-AI collaboration, prompt engineering, and digital dexterity should become part of your toolbox. At apexanalytix, we’re even seeing clients create roles such as Procurement Technology Lead and AI Strategy Lead.
The Demise of the Procurement Professional Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
The mass layoffs predicted from the use of AI have not materialized. Yes, people have lost their jobs to AI, and Gartner was careful not to minimize that fact. But it hasn’t happened to the extent initially predicted.
Gartner data shows that, of all layoffs in the second half of 2025, only 9% were directly attributed to AI adoption. The remaining 91% were attributed to traditional, non-AI factors, such as economic and financial distress or mergers and acquisitions.
People also seem to forget one important fact: LLMs and AI depend on human knowledge. When your best people leave your organization, they take their knowledge with them, and the AI suffers. This creates what Gartner calls context debt. In a study of 213 senior procurement leaders, less than one-third of procurement teams reported having fully documented, version-controlled, and audited process documentation.
One solution is to create a knowledge graph containing machine-readable context assets from structured, semistructured, and unstructured data across suppliers, categories, contracts, risks, and decisions.
This was music to my ears because that’s exactly what we do at apexanalytix. We bring together your supplier data, parts, products, and contracts, along with your risk appetite statements, policies, and procedures, in a client-specific instance in our private AI data center. Client information is never shared with a public LLM or commingled with other client data.
The AI can then use your information to continually improve procurement, finance, and risk processes. GenAI can suggest next steps, actions, and decisions for humans to initiate, while agentic AI can create and execute those tasks and actions automatically.
Conclusion
So, will procurement need to go faster?
Absolutely. But speed alone won’t save you from the T-Rex.
You need the right process, the right data, and the right people driving it. AI can accelerate onboarding, surface insights, and take routine work off your plate, but it can’t replace the judgment and institutional knowledge your team builds over time.
To win, companies need to build new skills, close their context debt, and rethink what procurement professionals are there to do. Dr. Ian Malcolm was right: you do need to go faster.
Just make sure you understand what you’re running toward.
