The strategic move CIOs must take to transform procurement

Many procurement teams are struggling to optimize spend while effectively managing supplier relationships, mitigating supply chain disruptions, and maintaining compliance. Traditional procurement processes – often manual and siloed – can’t keep up.

To increase competitiveness, organizations are turning to AI-driven solutions that transform the procurement function with automation and intelligence.

By implementing AI technologies purpose-built for procurement, CIOs can help their organizations overcome procurement challenges while enhancing the function end to end.

Key challenges for procurement teams

Many procurement teams struggle with poor data quality and inadequate analytics capabilities, making data-driven decision-making impossible.

“Procurement is limited by siloed systems and isolated processes,” says Alex Zhong, global product marketing leader at GEP. “They don’t have global visibility into their operations, and the data they do have isn’t real-time; it reflects what’s happened in the past.”

A lack of visibility into spend and approval processes can lead to maverick spending, making it harder for procurement teams to enforce compliance and control costs. At the same time, workflows are often inefficient, complicated, and confusing, causing delays and frustration. Without modern tools, procurement also struggles to manage supplier relationships.

Optimizing with AI-powered procurement

By investing in AI-powered solutions designed to deliver the visibility and intelligence today’s procurement teams require, organizations can overcome these challenges, achieving quantifiable cost savings while mitigating risks and improving quality.

“Procurement isn’t just about finding the lowest price,” Zhong explains. “It often involves complex, specialized purchases — like sourcing varying grades of steel from around the world. Navigating that requires intelligent decision-making around timing, quantity, and supplier selection.”

Leading solutions deliver on that front, enabling organizations to achieve total procurement orchestration while shattering data silos, streamlining workflows, and providing full-spectrum visibility into processes.

By leveraging AI tools specific to procurement, teams can make rapid, data-driven decisions in real time, working efficiently with suppliers and internal teams to unlock the full potential of the procurement function.

“It’s important to see that procurement is part of the supply chain,” Zhong says. “To unlock its full potential, procurement must be tightly aligned with both suppliers and downstream partners.”

Procurement orchestration starts with a well-designed, user-friendly platform that streamlines intake.

Automation tools help teams reduce manual efforts and rapidly surface data-driven insights to improve decision-making and bake in efficiency across the procurement lifecycle. With a centralized space for collaboration, procurement can also work effectively with both internal and external partners.

“The problem in the past is that everyone worked in silos due to the lack of collaborative tools and visibility,” Zhong says. “With new AI capabilities — and new technologies like low-code — these platforms make collaboration a lot easier and faster.”

The impact of total procurement orchestration can be transformative. One GEP customer reduced lead time on order-to-ship-to-receipt velocity by 20%, accelerated issue resolution time by 40%, and increased order management and warehousing productivity by 30%.

“This isn’t incremental change — it’s a paradigm shift and a complete revolution,” Zhong concludes. “Procurement leaders must shift their mindset to match the moment, or risk being left behind.”

Read GEP’s 2025 Outlook Report now.