AI Scaled the Wrong Thing

Here is something that is happening right now in procurement and nobody is saying it out loud.

A business rolls out AI access to its facilities management team. Six hundred people. Six hundred people who can now write their own procurement scope, run their own market queries, generate their own supplier briefs.

Sounds like progress.

It is not.

Here is what actually happens. Each of those 600 people uses their own language, their own understanding of the market, and their own version of what good looks like. You do not get one best-practice scope that draws on the collective knowledge of the business. You get 600 unique queries, 600 unique responses, and 600 different quality standards.

And then you get hundreds of suppliers trying to respond to briefs that cannot be compared, cannot be evaluated consistently, and cannot drive any meaningful commercial outcome.

AI did not solve the problem. It scaled it.

The Problem Nobody Is Naming

The issue with AI in procurement is not that it cannot do the work. It is that AI is only as good as the thinking behind it.

Automate a bad process and you get bad outcomes faster. Build a query function on top of market ignorance and you scale the ignorance. Give 600 people who do not understand procurement the ability to generate procurement documents and you get 600 different versions of the same mistake -- produced at speed, with confidence, and looking professional.

That last part is the dangerous bit. AI output looks finished. It does not look like a draft that needs interrogating. And if the person reading it does not have the experience to know what is missing, it goes out the door.

This is not a technology problem. It is an expertise problem that technology has made easier to overlook.

What I Have Learned From Running Tenders

Anyone who has run a competitive tender knows what vague specifications produce: vague responses.

If your scope does not tell the market what you actually need, the market fills in the gaps. Every supplier fills them differently. And you spend the back half of the evaluation process trying to compare submissions that are not remotely comparable.

This is not new. It is one of the oldest problems in procurement. What is new is that AI gives the appearance of a complete, considered scope -- even when the thinking behind it is shallow. The document looks professional. The gaps are invisible until you try to evaluate what comes back.

The fix is the same as it has always been. The scope has to reflect real market knowledge, real service standards, and real understanding of what the contract needs to deliver. AI can help you write it. It cannot replace the knowledge that needs to go into it.

What Good Looks Like

When I build a procurement tool on top of AI, the starting point is never the technology. It is the brief.

What is the process? What variables change between engagements? Where does human judgement have to sit? What happens if the output is wrong? What does the result need to look like so that a client can actually use it?

Those questions take experience to answer well. Once they are answered properly, AI can do extraordinary things with them. The output is consistent, commercially sound, and built on thinking that has been tested in the real world.

That is the difference between an AI tool that genuinely improves procurement outcomes and one that produces 600 different versions of a bad brief.

The Point

I use AI every day. I think anything that can be automated should be automated. But the word that matters in that sentence is should.

The judgement about what should be automated, what the instructions should say, and when the output needs a human to interrogate it -- that is not something AI provides. That is what experience provides.

The businesses that will use AI well in procurement are the ones that invest in the thinking that sits behind the tool. Not just in access to the technology.

AI is not the shortcut around procurement expertise. It depends on it.

Debbie Hack is the founder and principal procurement advisor at QBE Consulting. QBE stands for Qualified by Experience -- 18 years of senior procurement experience across facilities management, commercial property, government, healthcare, industrial and retail sectors. Get in touch at info@qbeconsulting.com.au