Navigating the Waves of AI Adoption – Alan Rice

Alan Rice has lived through every procurement tech wave since snail-mail RFPs, and he says what’s happening right now with AI is the biggest one yet. In this episode of Let’s Talk Direct, he breaks down why the transactional and tactical work that used to eat up a procurement team’s day is disappearing, and what that means for the people left holding the strategic pieces. Take the time to watch the interview to find out where you can still add value.

What You’ll Learn

Alan has spent his career on both sides of procurement transformation, first as a Senior Procurement Leader running teams through it, then helping other organizations do the same. In this conversation, he traces the real arc of procurement technology: the three-ring-binder RFPs that took months to turn around, the dot-com era’s first wave of procurement tech, and the long stretch from the early 2000s to 2023 where almost nothing changed. Then generative AI showed up and reset the timeline entirely.

He breaks procurement work into three buckets: transactional, tactical, and strategic. For years, only the transactional layer got automated, things like purchase-order-to-invoice processing and catalog shopping. Everything else – intake, sourcing, category management, negotiating, contract management – stayed manual. What’s shifted in AI in procurement over the last two years is that the tactical layer is now being absorbed by AI too, which means the strategic work, the highest-value work an enterprise gets from its procurement team, is finally where people can spend their time.

He also gets candid about a problem most companies aren’t talking about yet: when businesses don’t give employees access to generative AI tools, people go find their own, on their own devices, on their own subscriptions. He calls this a privacy backdoor that companies are creating for themselves, and he argues it’s a big part of why the pressure to roll out AI access company-wide is accelerating right now.

If you’ve ever wondered where the line is between AI doing the busywork and people doing the thinking, this episode lays it out plainly, no hype, no vague futurism, just someone who’s lived through every procurement tech cycle telling you what’s actually different this time.

More Information

Agentic AI Is Redesigning the Future of Procurement
The Agentic Revolution: Procurement’s Opportunity to Lead the AI-Native Enterprise
LinkedIn: Alan J. Rice