Independent · Published from Germany
Procurement runs on documents. So does the technology.
Most of what artificial intelligence can usefully do for a buying organisation comes down to one thing: reading a document, comparing it with a reference, and saying where the two disagree. That happens to be exactly what your people spend their days doing. These are field notes on making that trade sensibly.
The current note
Invoice control
The invoice you check twice
Cumulative billing means every interim invoice restates the whole job. Before anyone verifies a single new line, a large share of the effort has gone into copying forward what was already approved last time.
More field notes
What AI actually does in procurement
Reading documents, comparing them against a reference, and flagging what looks wrong. Everything else you have been sold is either an interface on top of that, or a promise nobody has kept yet.
Fundamentals6 min 03
Article 4 quietly landed on your desk
Since February 2025 the EU AI Act obliges every company deploying an AI system to ensure its staff have sufficient AI literacy. If your buyers use Copilot, that includes you.
Regulation5 min 04
Five questions before you buy the tool
A procurement department that cannot answer these five questions about its own process will not get a good outcome from any vendor, however capable the software.
Buying advice6 min
Where I am usually called in
Full description →Situation one
Checking costs more than the errors
Invoices arrive on paper or as PDFs, are verified by hand against contracts and measurements, and corrected in most cases. Nobody can say what the checking itself costs.
- Documented process baseline
- Effort measured per step, not estimated
- A ranked list you can put in front of a board
Situation two
A tool was bought, nothing changed
The software works as advertised. The process around it did not move, so the same people do the same work, now with an extra system in the way.
- Honest assessment of what the tool can carry
- The process redesign that was skipped
- Adoption work with the people affected
Situation three
Your buyers already use AI
Copilot and ChatGPT are in daily use, unsupervised, often on supplier data. Nobody has written down what is allowed, and Article 4 of the AI Act has been in force since 2025.
- Training that changes how people work
- Written record of the qualification
- Ground rules agreed with legal and works council
The position
Process first. Technology is the easy part.
I did not arrive at artificial intelligence through artificial intelligence. I arrived through a decade of sitting next to people while they worked, writing down what actually happens, and finding that the documented process and the real one rarely match.
That order matters. A model that reads invoices flawlessly will not help an organisation that cannot say which approval step everything waits on. Conversely, once a process is genuinely understood, the technical part is usually smaller than anyone expected — and occasionally unnecessary.
Talk it through
Thirty minutes on your actual process.
Describe where the time goes and I will tell you what I would tackle first — including the cases where the honest answer is that software is not your problem. No charge, no obligation.