As suppliers embrace AI to streamline negotiations, many procurement teams are falling behind, slowed by data concerns, budget limits, and organizational inertia. Fairmarkit’s 2025 Index reveals a widening execution gap, with buyers under pressure to act faster than their systems and skills allow. Despite executive mandates, internal roadblocks persist, raising questions about how, and how quickly, procurement can adapt.
Suppliers Are Moving Faster Than Buyers
Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the pace and structure of procurement deals, but internal constraints are slowing enterprise response. According to Fairmarkit’s 2025 AI in Procurement Index, 94% of surveyed procurement leaders say their suppliers are already using AI to accelerate negotiations. Meanwhile, less than half of buying teams feel confident in the accuracy or completeness of the AI-generated data underpinning their own decisions.
This mismatch is creating anxiety as procurement is asked to make faster, smarter calls, with fewer people and legacy infrastructure. 43% of respondents fear bad AI data could lead to costly errors, and 39% worry that autonomous tools might lock in poor terms during high-speed supplier interactions. These concerns are growing against a backdrop of economic instability: 84% of leaders expect a recession by year-end, and 45% cite cost containment as their top priority.
The result is a widening credibility gap. While 91% of companies have senior-level mandates to implement AI, progress is uneven. Data privacy fears (64%), governance roadblocks (55%), high implementation costs (56%), and lack of technical fluency (52%) continue to stall momentum.
From Capability Gaps to Talent Realignment
The pressure to adopt AI isn’t only transforming procurement workflows, it’s also reshaping what future-ready teams must look like. Despite widespread concerns over automation replacing jobs, Fairmarkit’s data reveals that 47% of procurement leaders expect their headcount to increase over the next 12 months.
What’s changing isn’t the number of roles, it’s the nature of the work. Strategic data interpretation, enterprise collaboration, and agile decision-making are now core capabilities. Technical upskilling is also becoming essential, as organizations rethink traditional procurement career paths to include AI fluency and cross-functional integration.
To move from lagging to leading, Fairmarkit outlines four immediate priorities: improve procurement data quality at the source, simplify AI interfaces for daily users, embed compliance into AI tools from the outset, and fund targeted training that aligns with new responsibilities.
Avoiding Speed Traps
As AI gains ground in procurement, the urgency to implement often overshadows the discipline needed to govern. Moving fast without recalibrating how decisions are made, especially in decentralized or matrixed organizations, can lead to opaque accountability, conflicting priorities, and downstream compliance risks. The bigger danger isn’t being late to AI, but embedding it into broken processes. Procurement teams that step back to align on roles, thresholds, and risk ownership will not only deploy smarter, they’ll avoid having to unwind flawed systems later.
