Procurement in the Age of AI

Your suppliers have been working with better information than you. That era is ending.

In February 2018, KFC closed nearly nine hundred restaurants across the United Kingdom because it ran out of chicken. Not a marketing failure. Not an operations failure. A procurement failure - one supplier transition, inadequately stress-tested, costing roughly a million pounds a day. The analysis that would have caught it was entirely possible. Nobody had the eighty hours it required.

That constraint is gone.

Procurement in the Age of AI is a working manual for the practitioner who wants to know exactly what artificial intelligence does in this function - not in theory, not next year, but on a Tuesday afternoon at your desk. Drawing on thirty years across complex negotiations, global supplier relationships, and the classroom, David Johnson separates what these tools genuinely deliver from what they are merely promised to deliver.

Inside:

• Spend analysis workflows that compress weeks of classification into hours
• Supplier capability assessments that surface the gaps a reference call never will
• Adversarial war-gaming prompts that stress-test a deal before you sign it
• Real-time supplier risk monitoring assembled from public signals
• Contract intelligence for obligation extraction, renewal exposure, and clause risk
• A human-plus-AI operating model, and the implementation sequence to reach it
• A frank account of ethics, bias, and where these tools should not be trusted

Two arguments run through the book. The first is that AI reverses the information asymmetry that has favored sophisticated enterprise sellers for a generation. The second is that it amplifies practitioners rather than replacing them: the judgment, the relationships, and the commercial instinct remain yours, while the preparation that used to get skipped now actually gets done.

This is not a book about the future of procurement. It is a book about the capability already sitting on your desk, and what separates the professionals who use it from the ones who read about it.

Written for category managers, sourcing leads, procurement directors, chief procurement officers, contract managers, supply chain professionals, and the finance and operations partners who depend on them.

Includes a practitioner's toolkit of ready-to-use prompts, frameworks, and checklists.