Whose name is on it?

Ten sentences on AI in procurement, from twenty years of practice and a talk in Frankfurt.

Where the sentences come from

The control nobody wrote down.

On 22 October 2026 I stood on stage at the Global Pharma Supply Chain & Logistics Forum in Frankfurt. My topic: the control nobody wrote down. What happens to procurement when AI agents take over execution and the rules live only in people's heads?

The best question came from the audience: can AI in procurement not be done well at all, or have I only seen it done badly? My answer: it can work very well. But only once rules, data and a named owner are in place first. That became ten sentences.

Ten sentences

Rules first, then the machine.

01
Rules first, then the machine. AI only creates value once rules, data and handovers are in place. The time at the start matters most.
02
An AI that does not ask is dangerous. Agents do not flag ambiguity, they resolve it with assumptions. A good tool marks the gap and asks.
03
Every case has a name. Not “procurement”, but a person. If something goes wrong, the AI is not to blame. The owner is missing. Find the person.
04
No order without a contact person. Suppliers need a human they can call. Treat partners anonymously and you lose their ideas.
05
Administration is not value. From requisition to payment, roughly 90 percent of the ordering process is administration: filling fields, writing orders, reading standard contracts. It creates no value of its own. Value is created in the last ten percent: in the decision, in the negotiation, in the conversation with the supplier.
06
Freed-up time needs a purpose. Whoever wins back hours says beforehand what for: strategic projects, own ideas, business units that get faster.
07
Whoever only administers gets bypassed. If procurement does not understand the business, the business unit hires its own people. Trust returns when procurement solves the other side's pain.
08
Bad data, bad results. And where data is missing, the machine invents some. Approval matrices belong under continuous checks against HR data.
09
Ask your vendors how many buyers sit on their team. Rules are written only by those who have walked through the mud, not by those who describe it from the outside.
10
Hidden costs are real costs. Chasing, frustration and bypassing appear in no ledger. They become visible only when the money already sits with the wrong supplier. In one case I supported, it was 1.5 million.

Why the Workbench exists

Invent no values. Mark the gap and ask.

I did not build the AICTIONBOT™ Workbench because I wanted an app. I wanted to get rid of my own controls and my own admin. If it works for me, it works for anyone.

That is why the Workbench invents no values. It marks the gap and asks. The decision stays with the person whose name is on it.

Try it free for 7 days Talks and stages

Dario Kulić, KULIC Advisory, Cologne. October 2026. Auf Deutsch lesen