AI and Purchasing

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This webinar is designed for procurement and sourcing professionals, including contract managers, sourcing leaders, contract attorneys, and supplier relationship management practitioners, who are exploring the potential of AI to address commercial challenges. While AI offers remarkable capabilities, there are key areas where human expertise remains indispensable.

In this session, we’ll focus on six critical aspects where human skills are essential to achieving procurement, contracting, and supply chain management excellence, with an emphasis on integrating procurement strategies with larger business objectives:

  • Aligning Sourcing and Category Strategies with Enterprise Goals
  • Achieving Supplier Relationship Management Excellence through Engagement
  • Fostering Agile Collaboration with Internal Stakeholders
  • Mitigating Risks and Ensuring Compliance through Empathy and Intuition
  • Building Trust, Driving Collaboration, and Inspiring Innovation
  • Communicating Effectively and Leading Change

Join us to uncover how these human-driven strategies can complement AI tools, ensuring your procurement and sourcing initiatives lead to transformative outcomes.

Your Benefits for Attending:
  • Gain insights into balancing AI capabilities with human expertise
  • Learn strategies to align procurement initiatives with business goals
  • Discover techniques to foster collaboration and build trust
  • Understand the importance of empathy and intuition in risk mitigation
  1. Introduction
  2. Welcome 00:02:03
  3. Commercial Project Yield Rates 00:03:57
  4. Delivery, Strategy, Negotiate, and Tender 00:11:13
  5. Is There New DNA For Commercial Practice? 00:26:37
  6. Area 1: Aligning Sourcing and Category Strategies with Enterprise Goals 00:32:55
  7. Mandate from CEO: We Must Increase Our OROA by 20% for Three Consecutive Years 00:33:52
  8. How Can My Contracts Help Me Build My Company's OROA? 00:42:40
  9. Human Solution 00:46:50
  10. Area 2: Achieving SRM Excellence through Supplier Engagement 00:47:40
  11. What Should I Do With A Bottleneck Supplier? 00:49:29
  12. Identifying A Bottleneck 00:51:55
  13. Identifying A Bottleneck Cont’d 00:58:36
  14. Area 3: Fostering Agile Collaboration with Internal Stakeholders 01:01:01
  15. Area 4: Mitigating Risks and Ensuring Compliance Through Empathy and Intuition 01:07:48
  16. Supplier Announces Cost Reduction Plans 01:19:06
  17. Area 5: Building Trust, Driving Collaboration, and Inspiring Innovation 01:21:46
  18. McKinsey Quote 01:22:56
  19. It Starts With Trust 01:23:36
  20. Trust 01:23:53
  21. Collaboration 01:24:00
  22. Innovation 01:24:26
  23. AI Robot - Fostering Trust 01:26:02
  24. Area 6: Communicating Effectively and Leading Change 01:27:40
  25. Per PROSCI: Change Management Experts (5+ Years) Use AI in Their Practice More Than Novices 01:26:20
  26. Are You a Change Management Expert or Novice? 01:34:00
  27. AI Implementation and Utilization Falls Short Because Change Management Skills Are Lagging 01:34:05
  28. Human-Based Communications Are More Effective with PERCS 01:35:54
  29. Perception: Sensory Stimuli From Environment 01:36:56
  30. Areas 1 - 6 01:39:31
  31. Any Questions? 01:41:15
  32. Presentation Closing 01:41:35
  • Jim Bergman

    Jim Bergman

    Jim is an experienced contracts attorney and procurement professional with international management consulting experience in the procurement field in the USA, UK, Europe, China, India, SE Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Australia. He has experience working in both the public and private sector on [...]

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ATAPU Credit

Aurora Training Advantage is offering continuing education points designed to recognize dedication to training and excellence in purchasing.

ISM Credit

Institute of Supply Management

This program may be used for Continuing Education Hours (CEH) toward recertification for programs offered by the Institute for Supply Management®, including the Certified Professional in Supply Management® and Certified Professional in Supplier Diversity®.

QPANJ Credit

Qualified Purchasing Agent - New Jersey

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) 00:01:24, 00:02:11, 00:04:05, 00:08:48, 00:16:23, 00:24:42, 00:30:10, 00:33:10, 00:57:34, 01:12:51, 01:26:13, 01:34:09
  • Asset 00:04:14, 00:09:25, 00:36:29
  • Audit 00:40:08
  • ChatGPT 00:45:29
  • Contract 00:04:15, 00:12:32, 00:18:1, 00:26:47, 00:30:02, 01:08:32
  • Cost 01:19:22
  • Inventory 00:40:10
  • Liability 01:08:41
  • OROA - Operating Return on Assets 00:34:06, 00:36:14, 00:41:10
  • Procurement 00:01:33, 00:03:04, 00:04:29, 00:11:12, 00:18:14, 00:26:45, 00:32:42, 00:41:23
  • Risk Allocation 01:08:21
  • Risk Management 01:08:19
  • Risk Mitigation 00:09:15, 00:18:39, 01:11:31, 01:26:59
  • Stakeholders 00:18:16, 01:02:13
  • Supplier 00:14:28, 00:37:36, 00:47:36, 00:58:26, 01:19:14
  • Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) 00:27:40, 00:29:56
  • Supply Chain 00:41:22
  • Transaction 00:06:29

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Artificial intelligence is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by humans or animals.

Asset: Property owned by a person or company, regarded as having value and available to meet debts, commitments or legacies.

Audit: A formal examination of an organization's or individual's accounts or financial situation

ChatGPT: ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022, notable for enabling users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language used.

Contract: A written or spoken agreement, especially one concerning employment, sales, or tenancy, that is intended to be enforceable by law.

Cost: The sum of the applicable expenditures and charges directly or indirectly incurred in bringing an article to its existing condition and location

Inventory: A company's inventory typically involves goods in three stages of production: raw goods, in-progress goods, and finished goods that are ready for sale. Inventory or stock refers to the goods and materials that a business holds for the ultimate goal of resale, production or utilization.

Liability: In financial accounting, a liability is defined as the future sacrifices of economic benefits that the entity is obliged to make to other entities as a result of past transactions or other past events, the settlement of which may result in the transfer or use of assets, provision of services or other yielding of economic benefits in the future.

OROA - Operating Return on Assets: OROA stands for Operating Return on Assets, which is a financial ratio that measures a company's efficiency and profitability. It is a variation of the traditional Return on Assets (ROA) ratio.

Procurement: Procurement is the process of finding and agreeing to terms, and acquiring goods, services, or works from an external source, often via a tendering or competitive bidding process. Procurement is used to ensure the buyer receives goods, services, or works at the best possible price when aspects such as quality, quantity, time, and location are compared.

Risk Allocation: Risk allocation is the process of identifying risk and determining how and to what extent they should be shared. Most owners understand that risk is an inherent part of the construction process and cannot be eliminated.

Risk Management: is the process of identifying, understanding, and grading risks so they can be better managed and mitigated.

Risk Mitigation: Risk mitigation involves taking action to reduce an organization's exposure to potential risks and reduce the likelihood that those risks will happen again.

Stakeholders: A stakeholder is a party that has an interest in a company and can either affect or be affected by the business. The primary stakeholders in a typical corporation are its investors, employees, customers and suppliers.

Supplier: A supplier is an entity that supplies goods and services to another organization. A supplier is usually a manufacturer or a distributor. A distributor buys goods from multiple manufacturers and sells them to its customers. Similar Terms. A supplier is also known as a vendor.

Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) : Supplier relationship management is the discipline of strategically planning for, and managing, all interactions with third-party organizations that supply goods and/or services to an organization The objective of SRM is to maximize the value of those interactions.

Supply Chain: A supply chain is a network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute a specific product to the final buyer. The supply chain also represents the steps it takes to get the product or service from its original state to the customer.

Transaction: In QuickBooks, a transaction type identifies what kind of transaction occurred, such as a customer transaction, bill payment or a bank transfer. When you submit a transaction, you type in a transaction code to represent it.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Despite AI's impressive capabilities in procurement automation and analytics, there are six critical areas where human expertise remains not just valuable but indispensable—and where over-reliance on AI creates strategic risk. Aligning sourcing and category strategies with enterprise goals requires contextual business judgment that AI cannot provide: understanding the CEO's strategic priorities, reading organizational politics, and making trade-offs between competing business objectives demands human insight. Achieving supplier relationship management excellence through genuine engagement—building trust, navigating difficult conversations, and inspiring collaborative innovation—requires empathy and relationship intelligence that AI can support but not replace. Fostering agile collaboration with internal stakeholders requires influence, diplomacy, and interpersonal reading that algorithms cannot perform. Mitigating complex compliance and ethical risks requires intuition about situations where rules are ambiguous and consequences are high-stakes. Building trust, driving collaboration, and inspiring innovation in supplier relationships are fundamentally human achievements. Communicating effectively and leading the organizational change required to adopt new AI tools requires human change management capabilities. Aurora Training Advantage's AI and Purchasing webinar with contracts attorney Jim Bergman examines each of these six areas in depth, providing procurement professionals with a clear framework for integrating AI while investing in the human capabilities that create transformative commercial outcomes.
Aligning procurement and sourcing strategy with enterprise goals is a fundamentally strategic act that requires procurement leaders to speak the language of business performance rather than just purchasing metrics. AI can provide the analytical foundation—spend data, supplier performance analytics, market intelligence, and contract compliance metrics—but translating those insights into enterprise-level strategic alignment requires human judgment and organizational context. A CEO mandate to increase Operating Return on Assets (OROA) by 20%, for example, requires procurement to understand which cost levers, capital efficiency improvements, and revenue-enabling supply chain investments will contribute most meaningfully to that goal—a translation from business strategy to sourcing strategy that demands both financial literacy and organizational knowledge. AI tools can model scenarios and surface optimization opportunities, but the prioritization decisions require procurement leaders to engage deeply with business unit leaders to understand what matters most. Contracts designed with performance-based incentives aligned to operating margin improvement, rather than simply lowest unit cost, reflect this strategic orientation. Aurora Training Advantage's AI and Purchasing webinar with Jim Bergman provides procurement professionals with frameworks for building this enterprise alignment capability alongside AI-powered analytical tools.
Trust is the foundational enabler of successful AI adoption in procurement and supply chain—without it, even technically superior AI implementations fail to deliver value. Trust operates at three levels in AI-driven procurement transformation. At the individual level, procurement professionals must trust AI-generated insights enough to act on them rather than overriding them based on habit or intuition—which requires understanding how the AI reaches its conclusions and seeing its recommendations validated over time. At the organizational level, internal stakeholders must trust that AI-enhanced procurement decisions serve their interests and are not simply optimizing for procurement metrics at the expense of business outcomes—which requires transparent communication about how AI is being used and what safeguards exist. At the supply chain level, suppliers must trust that AI-driven interactions—automated communications, algorithmic performance scoring, AI-assisted negotiations—are fair and that human oversight exists for consequential decisions. McKinsey research confirms that AI implementation falls far short of its potential when change management is treated as an afterthought, with the human adoption challenge being larger than the technical challenge in most cases. Aurora Training Advantage's AI and Purchasing webinar with Jim Bergman directly addresses trust-building as the critical success factor for AI adoption in procurement.
Procurement risk management increasingly relies on AI for data-driven risk identification—analyzing supplier financial health, geopolitical exposure, lead time volatility, and compliance history at a scale and speed no human team can match. But the most consequential risk management decisions require empathy and intuition that AI cannot provide. When a critical supplier announces unexpected cost reduction plans, the procurement professional must read between the lines: is this a genuine efficiency initiative, a signal of financial distress, a precursor to quality cuts, or an attempt to renegotiate contract terms? Making that judgment requires deep relationship knowledge, industry context, and the ability to interpret human behavior—capabilities that are uniquely human. Risk allocation in complex contracts requires understanding what the other party values most, where they have flexibility, and what outcomes they fear—insight derived from relational intelligence rather than data analysis. Compliance in ethically ambiguous situations—where the rules are unclear and the stakes involve reputational risk—requires moral judgment and contextual wisdom. AI can surface the data; procurement leaders provide the judgment that determines what to do with it. Aurora Training Advantage's AI and Purchasing webinar with Jim Bergman explores how human empathy and intuition complement AI capabilities to achieve procurement risk management excellence.
AI implementation in procurement consistently underperforms technical expectations when change management is treated as an afterthought—a finding confirmed by McKinsey and PROSCI research that shows organizations with mature change management capabilities realize significantly higher AI adoption rates and business value. The change required for AI adoption in procurement is substantial: workflows must be redesigned, roles must evolve, decision-making authority must be redistributed, and professionals must develop comfort with acting on AI recommendations rather than solely on institutional knowledge. Effective change management for AI procurement starts with clear articulation of the why: how will AI improve outcomes for the procurement team, for internal stakeholders, and for the organization's strategic goals? Early involvement of affected professionals in tool selection and implementation builds ownership. Providing adequate training and a learning curve period prevents productivity losses during transition. Designating change champions within the procurement team who model AI adoption positively accelerates broader uptake. Human-based communications that appeal to perception, emotion, and reason—what Jim Bergman calls the PERCS model—are more effective than data-driven mandates in driving behavioral change. Aurora Training Advantage's AI and Purchasing webinar covers change management for AI adoption as a core competency for procurement leaders navigating this transformation.