The Procurement Paradox: What Happens When AI Frees Up 60% of Your Time?

The industry promises strategic transformation through automation, but nobody is asking the uncomfortable question: is there enough strategic work to absorb all that freed capacity?

The mantra echoes across conference stages and magazine headlines. Agentic AI will free up 60% or more of procurement’s time for strategic work. The promise sounds transformative. The reality may be far more complicated.

A recent post by Lutz Schirrmeister raised the question nobody wants to ask. When procurement technology actually delivers what providers promise, what happens next? Is there really enough strategic room and skill to absorb that freed-up time?

The industry risks flipping today’s talent shortage into tomorrow’s overcapacity. Worse, organizations might lose the tacit experience, curiosity, and human improvisation that drive true innovation.

The future is not autonomous. It is augmented. And that distinction matters more than the industry wants to admit.

The Uncomfortable Math

The productivity promise is everywhere. Automation will handle transactional work. AI agents will manage routine decisions. Procurement professionals will finally focus on strategy.

But Fabian Lampe at Advance Procurement stated what others think but hesitate to say. “You answered it. There is no need for this much resource for strategic work. The jobs will disappear.”

The math is simple. If AI eliminates 60% of current work and strategic activities cannot absorb that capacity, organizations face overcapacity. Companies do not maintain excess headcount. They adjust.

Aiman Nadeem identified the trap. “We all want AI to save time, but without a clear roadmap for that time, we risk filling it with busy work instead of real strategic value. Overcapacity will only create a new set of problems.”

The response from Schirrmeister acknowledged the risk. Organizations should be mindful when to implement what solution and should not jump on every shiny thing just because another organization is implementing it. Strategic planning is key.

But how many procurement organizations actually have strategic plans that account for massive productivity increases? Most are still trying to justify headcount for current workloads.

The Demographic Wild Card

Joël Collin-Demers at Digital Procurement Mentor provided crucial context that changes the equation. “In most countries, with a few notable exceptions, the demographics suggest a collapse of available working age resources by 30-40% versus today’s numbers in the next few decades. And immigration and new births skyrocketing won’t or can’t be high enough to counter this trend.”

His conclusion flips the overcapacity concern. “You better hope AI is able to deliver productivity increases for those workers because we’re going to need every able body available to sustain growth in these economies.”

Schirrmeister agreed but identified the real challenge. “The real challenge will be finding ways to bring along those who resist the change. In some countries, layoffs aren’t even a viable or simple option and frankly, that would be the easy way out anyway. Many of these individuals hold valuable knowledge, so the focus must be on a holistic transformation strategy that goes far beyond just implementing a great new tool.”

This tension defines the next decade. Aging workforces meet productivity automation. Organizations need fewer people to do more work at exactly the moment fewer people are available. The transition will be messy.

What Strategic Actually Means

Arne Jonas S., who focuses on agentic AI in procurement, nailed the paradox. “That 60% won’t go to strategy. It’ll go to sense-making: navigating ambiguous stakeholder dynamics, spotting weak signals AI misses, building trust in crises, challenging AI when it lacks context.”

His question cuts deep. “Are we building strategic thinkers who use AI? Or AI operators who occasionally think strategically? Big difference.”

The distinction matters. AI operators follow prompts and review outputs. Strategic thinkers use AI as one tool among many to solve complex business problems.

Michael A. Beauregard at a facility operations company appreciated the term augmented. “If we see this degree of productivity, but the net result is flat, we have overcapacity. However, if AI is augmenting the net result should be better. Incremental value.”

The incremental value question is critical. If AI simply makes existing work faster without enabling new value creation, organizations gain efficiency but not growth. Efficiency without growth leads to headcount reduction.

The Autonomous Trap

Schirrmeister expressed fatigue with the term autonomous. The future is augmented, where humans remain the designers, challengers, and conscience of the system.

Asmaa Gad at Supply Chain AI Pro agreed. “Love how you reframed the hype, Lutz. Augmented, not autonomous really captures the balanced future we should aim for.”

Schirrmeister shared context for the framing. “I once had the chance a while back to listen to Bob Murphy, still CPO of IBM at that time, in an interview he gave. In this session he was rewording AI into augmented intelligence and I quite liked that thought. It is the connect of both.”

Thomas Audibert at OnSource emphasized why the distinction matters. “Human in the loop oversight is indeed required. And knowing how to do it right is a key differentiator for an agent because it means it knows what it does know.”

Without human oversight, AI agents are powerful mirrors of the past, not architects of the future. They optimize for patterns in historical data. They cannot innovate beyond what they have seen.

The Reality Check

Nico Bac at Digital Procurement Now provided practical grounding. “Think about autonomous to a degree. If something is 50% autonomous while it was 100% manual before, someone has more time for strategic work. As an example, 50% of e-sourcing events at P&G were autonomous in 2020 when I left. It will be more again now.”

Schirrmeister pushed back gently. “However would you not have something similar happen in the strategic space as well? P2S and S2C will both be touched not just middle office and P2P, right?”

The point is crucial. AI will not just automate transactional work. It will also automate elements of strategic work. Market analysis, supplier risk assessment, scenario modeling. These are strategic activities that AI can handle.

If both tactical and strategic work get automated, where does the human value concentrate?

Where the Time Should Go

Markus Hoerr provided the most detailed answer. If 60% of time is freed up, use it to connect the dots with other functions in an effort creating value along the value chain.

His suggestions were specific. Talk to engineers and help harmonize and decarbonize product development to improve the direct spend baseline. Talk to finance and boost financial planning and analysis to yield more accurate savings tracking and CFO-aligned figures. Talk to AI governance colleagues and develop a plan to buy IT solutions with trustworthy AI embedded. Talk to IT to get contracts loaded into a secured in-house notebook type of solution.

He noted that according to BCG the IT category will constitute more than 50% of future cost of goods sold. So liaise with your CIO. Audit ruthlessly your SaaS footprint, shadow IT and shadow AI. Simplify and cost optimize with rigor, think outside the box and tech sales. Renew strategically your legacy tech stacks with loads of cross-functional co-creation possibilities. Infuse AI governance and data sovereignty into all steps.

His final recommendations: own your data and stand up data governance exactly as finance does it every month rolling up a balance sheet and profit and loss. Learn cyber, graph databases, data literacy, and AI literacy. Unlearn RFx when often wasted.

This vision represents real strategic expansion. Procurement moving upstream into product development. Procurement owning data governance. Procurement leading trustworthy AI implementation. These are genuinely new value creation opportunities.

But how many procurement organizations have the capability to execute this vision? And how many C-suites will allow procurement to expand into these domains?

The Memory Advantage

Jon W. Hansen at Procurement Insights offered a different perspective on where AI adds value. “Every new procurement innovation feels new only because the industry forgets its own history.”

He described connecting 27 years of procurement insights archives with conversational AI. “A single practitioner question triggers a living loop: prompt, recall, connect, refine, publish. Each conversation activates archived lessons, sharpening frameworks in real time.”

His point is that AI excels at pattern recognition across massive datasets. “This isn’t about more automation. It’s about memory and meaning, augmenting human judgment, not replacing it. The future of procurement intelligence won’t come from a new tool. It will come from remembering what we already know and using AI to see the connections faster.”

He noted that he connected a 2004 case study to 2025 challenges the industry is still experiencing. “In short, it isn’t about technology, it is about core fundamentals that transcend technological breakthroughs in any era.”

Schirrmeister agreed. “History repeats itself.”

This use case illustrates augmentation at its best. AI surfaces relevant historical context. Humans apply judgment about applicability to current situations. Neither works as well alone.

The Three A’s

Clive R Heal at LavenirAI provided a framework. “Procurement 3 A’s equals human augmented plus agentic plus autonomous. First to insights. Unpredictability and creativity and relationships. Human centricity. Mutual value creation. Bring it on.”

The framework acknowledges that all three modes have value. Some work should be fully autonomous. Some should be agentic with minimal human oversight. Some should be augmented with significant human involvement.

The challenge is determining which work belongs in which category. And accepting that the categories will shift as AI capabilities improve.

Work that requires human augmentation today may become fully autonomous tomorrow. Organizations that cannot adapt will fall behind. Organizations that automate too aggressively will lose critical human capabilities.

The Real Question

Schirrmeister posed the challenge directly. “To all the procurement enthusiasts, if 60% of your time were freed tomorrow, how would you use it to create real strategic value?”

Most procurement professionals cannot answer that question with specificity. They know they spend too much time on transactional work. They believe they should focus more on strategy. But they cannot articulate what strategic work means in operational terms.

This is the industry’s dirty secret. The call for more strategic focus has echoed for decades. AI finally offers the capacity to make it happen. But the industry has not developed the strategic capabilities to utilize that capacity.

Procurement has been so focused on fighting for a seat at the table that it has not prepared for what to do once it gets there.

The Path Forward

The answer is not to reject AI. Demographic trends make productivity gains essential. The answer is to be honest about capabilities and realistic about timelines.

Organizations should implement AI incrementally. Automate specific workflows. Measure the time savings. Develop concrete plans for how to deploy that time. Train people in strategic capabilities before removing their transactional work.

Stop selling transformation and start delivering evolution. The industry has oversold every previous wave of technology. This time should be different.

AI is powerful. AI will change procurement. But it will not make everyone strategic overnight. And it will not create strategic work that does not exist.

The future is augmented. That means humans and AI working together. It means being honest about what each does best. And it means accepting that some roles will disappear while others evolve.

The question is not whether AI will free up 60% of procurement’s time. The question is whether the industry is prepared for what comes next.

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