Procurement is about to change for good
James Belshaw
Founder, Procurement Code · 5 minute read
For most of my career, procurement has been given more to do without the means to do it. Cost first, then supplier risk, ESG, cyber, data and compliance. The mandate kept growing. The team and the operating model stayed the same. We coped and called it strategy.
I don't think we'll be coping for much longer. For the first time, the technology exists to take on the full mandate. That's the change I set up Procurement Code to help with.
The operating model
Many organisations have already bought the tools. What they're missing is an operating model that gets results from them. Put a platform on top of an old way of working and you get the old way of working, digitised. In my experience the operating model decides more of the outcome than the platform does.
That's why I talk about a procurement code. Every organisation already has one. It's the rules and habits by which it spends. The trouble is that it lives in documents and people's heads, not in the systems where spending happens. The work is to write it down so your technology can act on it. Increasingly that means your AI agents too.
Governance
The rules are changing too. One-size-fits-all policy was a concession to human limits. A single threshold that sends everything above a set figure to tender treats a risky new tool and a safe renewal the same way. When technology handles the routine, governance can match the real risk of each decision. It can change as conditions change, without waiting for the next review.
How the work changes
When governance is written so systems can act on it, agents take on the routine. People move from pushing transactions through a process to deciding how the process should behave. Before long, working in procurement will feel more like directing a team of agents than using a set of tools.
What it frees people to do
Too much of a procurement professional's time goes on chasing approvals and filling in the same forms. That work wears people down. Take it away and they spend their time on category strategy, the hard calls and the supplier relationships that make a difference to cost and risk.
That leaves every procurement team with a question to answer. What does strategic procurement mean here, for these people? When the routine runs on its own, people need to know what their job now is and have the skills to do it. Deciding that and equipping people for it is part of designing the operating model.
If any of this matches what you're seeing, I'd be glad to talk.