In any organisation, procurement teams play a crucial role in managing supplier relationships, controlling costs, and ensuring compliance. However, amidst these strategic responsibilities, procurement professionals often find themselves inundated with routine policy questions and administrative inquiries from staff. This continuous stream of inquiries can detract from their ability to focus on higher-value tasks, such as strategic sourcing and supplier negotiations.  

Fortunately, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) offer a promising solution to alleviate this burden and enable procurement teams to maximise their impact. Here’s some examples of how we see AI transforming procurement teams: 

1. Remove time-consuming distractions

Procurement staff are often inundated with questions from other departments. These questions generally revolve around policies, procedures, and approval processes available in existing documentation.  

While responding to these inquiries is an important part of ensuring best practice procurement processes are followed, the time spent directing staff can quickly add up, pulling the procurement team away from more strategic and high value initiatives. This diversion not only affects productivity but can also delay critical procurement outcomes. 

This is where AI can be a game changer. AI virtual assistants can be deployed to handle routine policy and procedure inquiries from staff, whether they be industry regulations, internal guidelines, or compliance standards. These virtual assistants are equipped with natural language processing capabilities, enabling them to understand and respond to questions accurately and promptly. By automating these responses, procurement staff can devote more time to more complex strategic activities. 

This is exactly what ReadyTech’s Ask Procurement tool does. Ask Procurement is built on the foundations of OpenAI and the GPT-4o Large Language Model. Your organisation can incorporate your policy and procedure documentation to your dedicated Ask Procurement tenant, turning Ask Procurement into your dedicated personal policy expert.  

2. Reduce inconsistency across the team

With a high volume of questions to address, there is a risk of inconsistent responses. Inconsistency can lead to confusion, compliance issues, and potential disruptions in procurement activities. Ensuring that every response is accurate and aligns with company policy requires significant effort and attention to detail. 

In comparison, AI systems can be trained to provide consistent and accurate responses based on a consistent policy set. This reduces the risk of misinformation and ensures that all staff receive the same, correct information regarding procurement policies and procedures, thus enhancing compliance and mitigating risk. 

The key is in ensuring your policy documents are correct and up to date, and providing the AI assistant with as much information as possible, to ensure they’re equipped to provide consistent and accurate responses. 

3. Position procurement as a strategic enabler

When procurement professionals are bogged down with a high volume of routine queries, their ability to focus on strategic tasks, such as developing supplier relationships, negotiating contracts, and optimising procurement processes, is compromised. This shift in focus can result in missed opportunities and reduced overall efficiency. 

AI is now ready to handle routine inquiries with an exceedingly high degree of accuracy. AI Automation frees up time for real humans to engage in strategic sourcing, supplier relationship management, and activities that drive greater value for the organisation, because let’s face it, we still do that best.

4. Scale as your business grows

As organisations grow, the volume of inquiries can increase exponentially. In today’s economic environment, there’s increasing pressure to do more with less, and growing the team isn’t always an option. 

AI-powered solutions can easily scale to handle a growing number of questions without a proportional increase in staffing. This scalability ensures that procurement teams can manage their workload effectively, regardless of the size of the organisation.  

In an era where every second counts and every decision matters, procurement professionals are constantly seeking ways to enhance efficiency, accuracy, and strategic value. By leveraging AI to automate these inquiries we are making the procurement policies more accessible, and freeing up procurement staff to become serious strategic enablers for their business. 

AI assistants offer an opportunity to both enhance productivity and ensure consistency and accuracy of information proliferation across the business. Organisations who embrace this technological advancement now, position themselves to deliver greater impact, achieve long-term success, and gain a commercial advantage that technology laggards do not. 

Find out how our purpose-built Ask Procurement solution could help your organisation embrace the power of AI and watch as your procurement team transforms from administrative responders to strategic leaders.