Michaela Dempsey, Chief Marketing Officer, Focal Point
I have spent more than two decades in enterprise technology, much of it in procurement and spend management. I joined Scout RFP at its Series A and stayed through its acquisition by Workday, then led marketing for Workday’s spend management portfolio. I was CMO at Evisort, the AI contract intelligence company Workday acquired in 2024, and most recently at Levelpath. I have watched this category promise transformation more than once.
When I say procurement is at an inflection point, I mean something specific: the money is moving faster than the value.
Investment is up. Value is not.
Procurement leaders are spending on AI.
In PwC’s 2026 Global Digital Procurement Survey, 47% of respondents named embedding AI as their top digital procurement investment for the next three years. The Hackett Group found 43% of organizations actively pursuing AI deployment in procurement, nearly double the year before.
The returns haven’t caught up. PwC found only 6% to 9% say AI is delivering tangible value today, depending on the use case. Hackett found only 12% report large-scale implementation.
That gap isn’t a technology failure. Most of the AI in those pilots works. The problem is where it was put.
AI was added to work that was never redesigned
Ask a procurement team how a request travels from “I need this” to a signed contract, and you will often hear about five systems, three spreadsheets and a lot of email. Ask who decides whether a new supplier is acceptable, or when an exception can be approved, and the real answer is more often than not, “it depends on who you ask.”
AI is unable to automate a decision nobody has defined. BCG estimates that 70% of the effort in a typical AI project belongs to people, organization and process redesign. PwC’s respondents point the same way: their top success factor is engagement with legal, finance and technology (56%), and operating-model transformation is where they most want outside help (49%).
The upside to all of this is large when the work is redesigned.
BCG’s modeling suggests AI can free up 60% of buyer capacity, but only when the full source-to-pay workflow is redesigned end to end. Bolting tools onto decades old process captures a fraction of that.
What moving beyond experimentation looks like
Procurement organizations and enterprises pulling ahead on AI do four things:
- Connect what they already have. Most enterprises do not need another system. They need their suite, ERP, contracts, risk data and the business’s requests working as one.
- Define decisions before they automate them. Who owns the decision, what evidence it needs, what limits apply, when it escalates. Procurement has always known how to do this and do it well. It is called a delegation of authority.
- Authorize AI work processes that should not need a person. Supplier checks, intake forms, routing, status updates belong to the machine, etc. Negotiation, supplier strategy and stakeholder judgment belong to people, who partnered with AI, now have more time for those processes.
- Measure outcomes, not activity. Pilots and licenses are easy to count. Savings realized, cycle time, more spend undermanagement, and risk avoided are what the CFO counts as business impact.
Why I joined Focal Point
Focal Point was founded by Anders Lillevik, a former Chief Procurement Officer who spent more than 20 years leading procurement organizations before building the platform he wished he’d had. You can feel that in the product. It does not ask the business to rip out what they have bought. It connects people, workflows, data and existing systems across intake, sourcing, contracts, supplier management and third-party risk, and it applies AI to the tactical work so teams can spend their time on the strategic.
Customers including Baker Tilly, Candescent, Messer and Orrick use Focal Point’s AI procurement platform today.
My job is to share those stories, and to help define what an AI procurement platform looks like when it works: not a demo or a pilot, but a better way to run the procurement function.
Join us at SIG
If you will be attending the SIG Global Executive Summit in Chicago on October 27, I invite you to join Stephan Hutter of Orrick and me for our session, “Beyond AI Experimentation: How Orrick Is Creating Enterprise Impact with an AI Procurement Platform.” We will discuss what it takes to move beyond pilots and point solutions, create meaningful business outcomes, and build a procurement operation that is ready for what comes next.
Cited sources from above post
