I had a conversation with a finance guy last year that I keep coming back to.
We’d just delivered documented savings across a restructured category portfolio. Clean numbers. Validated by finance. Tied to EBITDA. By any reasonable measure, it was a strong year.
His response: “That’s great. But are we going to have supply problems next quarter?”
He wasn’t being dismissive. He was telling me something I’d already started sensing but hadn’t fully put into words — savings are table stakes. The C-suite doesn’t lie awake worrying about whether procurement hit its cost target. They worry about disruption. About whether the supply base can support the growth plan. About risks they can’t see coming.
That conversation shifted something in me. Not in the daily work — that was already evolving. But in how I frame what procurement leadership is. The language I use. What I measure and what I report. What I push for in leadership meetings and what I let go.
This guide is what I’ve learned through that shift. Not from textbooks or vendor presentations, but from leading procurement at ThyssenKrupp, and now Thales Group. From managing portfolios worth billions of euros and discovering, again and again, that the hard part was never the negotiation or the process. The hard part was earning the trust of people who didn’t think procurement belonged at the strategic table.
If you lead a procurement function in 2026, I think this is worth reading. Not because I have all the answers. But because I’ve been working through the same questions you probably are — and I’ve been writing about what I find along the way.
Procurement leadership has changed — here’s how
The old model of procurement leadership had an elegant simplicity to it. Reduce cost. Manage suppliers. Control spend. Hit your savings target. Repeat.
That model still works if the only thing your organisation needs from procurement is cheaper inputs. Some companies operate that way, and there’s no judgment in that — it’s a valid approach for certain business contexts.
But for most organisations, something broke between 2020 and 2024. Supply chain disruptions exposed how little visibility companies actually had beyond their tier-one suppliers. Geopolitical fragmentation made single-source strategies feel suddenly reckless. ESG requirements turned into procurement problems overnight. And AI began changing the nature of the work itself.
The procurement leaders who adapted to this didn’t just add new responsibilities on top of the old ones. They repositioned what the function delivers. Risk visibility instead of just cost reports. Speed to market instead of just purchase order processing. Innovation access through the supply base. Cross-functional influence that shapes decisions before they’re made, not after.
Here’s what I’ve found uncomfortable to admit: most procurement functions still operate primarily as cost centres. Not because the people inside them aren’t capable. But because the organisations around them haven’t changed their expectations — and, if I’m honest, because procurement leaders haven’t always forced that conversation as hard as they should.
Repositioning doesn’t happen to you. You have to lead it. And that’s a different kind of work than managing categories and running RFPs.
I’ve written about this transition in more detail — rethinking procurement leadership explores what the shift actually looks like in practice, how to measure value beyond savings, and why most organisations still get it wrong. If you’re feeling stuck in the cost-centre frame, that’s where I’d start.
Risk management: from lagging indicators to predictive signals
I want to tell you about a supplier failure that changed how I think about risk.
The supplier failed on a Tuesday. No warning. No deterioration in KPIs. Quality scores were stable. Delivery performance was green across every dashboard we had. On Monday, everything looked fine. On Tuesday, a key production facility shut down without notice. Two product lines stopped. The cost of the disruption was roughly thirty times what we’d have spent preventing it.
The post-mortem taught me something I should have seen earlier. Every indicator we tracked was backward-looking. Delivery scores measured last month’s performance. Quality metrics reflected last quarter’s output. Financial health assessments used last year’s filings. We were driving by looking in the rearview mirror and wondering why we kept getting surprised by what was ahead.
That experience led me to develop what I called the Headwinds system — a risk forecasting approach built around leading indicators rather than lagging ones. The core question shifted from “did the supplier deliver on time last month?” to “are there signals that suggest they might not deliver next month?”
That’s a small change in wording. It’s a fundamental change in how you manage risk.
Leading indicators look different from what most risk dashboards show. A supplier asking for faster payment terms when they never have before. Key personnel departures you hear about through relationships, not reports. Changes in sub-tier supplier concentration. Shifts in production capacity utilisation that suggest problems upstream before they surface downstream.
None of these show up in standard SRM systems. They require human judgment, genuine relationships, and the kind of supply base knowledge that comes from being inside the function for years — not from observing it at a distance.
When I implemented this approach at ThyssenKrupp across a € multi-billion procurement portfolio, it generated over € multi-million in value through avoided disruptions and proactive renegotiations. Not because the system was particularly brilliant. Because it asked better questions than the ones we’d been asking before.
I’ve written a full breakdown of the framework, the indicators, and the implementation challenges in seeing risk before it breaks you. If your risk management still depends primarily on scorecards and quarterly reviews, I think that piece will resonate.
Influencing without authority: procurement’s core skill
Here’s something that took me years to fully understand about this function.
You’re responsible for outcomes you don’t control. You need engineering to finalise specifications before you can negotiate effectively. You need legal to approve contract terms. Finance to validate business cases. Operations to confirm volumes. Leadership to prioritise strategic sourcing over firefighting.
You need all of that. And you have formal authority over none of it.
Every procurement leader discovers this early. What separates the ones who grow from the ones who get frustrated is whether they develop genuine influence — the ability to move things without having the organisational power to simply direct them.
The approach I’ve built over two decades treats influence as a learnable skill, not a personality trait. It’s not about being charismatic or politically savvy. It’s about understanding what each stakeholder actually needs and learning to frame procurement’s value in their language.
When engineering is worried about material performance, I don’t start with cost. I start with “here are three suppliers who meet your specification, and here’s what each one means for your timeline.” Cost becomes part of the conversation naturally once I’ve addressed what they actually care about.
When the CFO asks about procurement, I don’t lead with savings. I lead with risk exposure. Working capital impact. I frame things in terms of EBITDA, not procurement KPIs. It’s not about hiding what we do — it’s about translating it into the terms that matter to the person I’m talking to.
I don’t think of this as manipulation. I think of it as translation. And in my experience, procurement leaders who never learn to do it stay at the tactical level regardless of how strong their sourcing skills are.
I’ve mapped out the full approach — stakeholder mapping, timing your influence, recovering when you lose credibility, sustaining it over time — in influence without authority. It’s probably the most universally applicable thing in this guide, because in procurement, the gap between your responsibility and your formal authority never really closes.
AI in procurement: what’s real, what’s hype
I spent three hours preparing for a supplier negotiation recently. Two years ago, that same preparation would have taken me three days.
The difference was AI. Not replacing my judgment — compressing the data work so I could spend my time on thinking instead of gathering.
That’s the reality of AI in procurement right now. Not the vendor webinar version. Not the “90% of procurement will be automated by 2028” forecast. The everyday, practical reality of what it’s actually like to use these tools in real sourcing work.
AI is genuinely exceptional at a few things that used to eat enormous amounts of procurement time. It reads and synthesises supplier data faster than any analyst could. It benchmarks pricing against market data in seconds. It models negotiation scenarios — “what if we extend the contract two years, increase volume by 30%, shift payment terms?” — while you’re still thinking through the first option.
But AI is also remarkably poor at the things that matter most in strategic procurement. It can’t read the room during a live negotiation. It can’t tell you that a supplier’s “final offer” isn’t really final because you noticed something in their body language that the data will never capture. It can’t build the kind of trust that gets you better terms next time. And it can’t find the creative trade that nobody expected — the one that unlocks value for both sides.
The procurement leaders I see winning right now aren’t choosing between AI and human judgment. They’re combining them deliberately. AI for preparation, human judgment for strategy. AI for data, human skill for relationships. AI for speed, human wisdom for the moments where speed isn’t the point.
I’ve written about this from two angles. AI and human negotiation covers the practical hybrid approach — the prompts that work, the phases where AI dominates, and the moments where it has to disappear. And agentic AI in procurement takes the wider view — what autonomous agents actually do today, which procurement roles are most exposed, and why the adoption gap matters more than the technology itself.
If you’re still preparing for negotiations the way you did three years ago, you’re probably entering rooms less prepared than the person across the table. And if you’re trusting AI to handle strategic relationships on its own, you’re making a different kind of mistake. The answer, as usual, is somewhere in the middle — and finding that middle requires understanding both sides well.
Where procurement skills transfer: product leadership and beyond
Here’s something I wish someone had told me earlier in my career.
The skills you build in procurement — negotiation, trade-off thinking, cross-functional influence, cost modelling, risk assessment, stakeholder management — are exactly the skills that product leaders spend years trying to develop. Most procurement professionals don’t see this because the career paths look so different on paper.
But in practice, the strongest product managers I’ve worked with think like buyers. They understand leverage. They evaluate trade-offs between cost, quality, speed, and risk without pretending that any of those dimensions is free. They’ve sat across from suppliers and learned what it means to negotiate outcomes when nobody has perfect information.
Meanwhile, product managers who’ve never worked closely with procurement often treat it as a final checkpoint — something that happens near the end of a product cycle. And then they’re caught off guard when launches slow down, costs run over, or supplier relationships create problems nobody planned for.
The gap runs in both directions. Product managers would benefit from procurement thinking earlier in their process. And procurement professionals have career paths available to them that nobody talks about because the skills aren’t framed as transferable.
I’ve explored both sides of this. The hidden path from procurement to product leadership maps out why procurement experience builds exactly the kind of judgment, trade-off thinking, and credibility that product roles demand. And product managers’ procurement blind spot examines the five mistakes PMs make when they treat procurement as an afterthought — and what changes when they involve it early.
If you’re in procurement and wondering what’s next, I’d encourage you to look at your skills with fresh eyes. They’re more portable than you might think.
What the C-suite actually needs from procurement leaders
I’ve reported to enough boards and executive committees to have a sense of what they genuinely want from procurement. It’s not what most of us assume.
They don’t want a savings report. They’ve seen hundreds. And if I’m being honest — which I think matters on a topic like this — most executives carry a healthy scepticism about procurement savings numbers. They know the figure is partly real value, partly creative accounting, and partly things that would have happened without procurement’s involvement. They’re not entirely wrong about that.
What they actually want are answers to three questions.
“Are we protected?” This is the risk question. Not a colour-coded heatmap — a genuine assessment. Which suppliers could hurt us? Where are we concentrated? What’s our exposure to geopolitical disruption, single-source dependency, or regulatory change? They want to know that someone is thinking about this systematically, not just reacting when something breaks.
“Can we move fast enough?” This is the speed question. When business development closes a deal that requires new supply capacity, can procurement deliver? When product development needs a new material qualified, how long does it take? When the strategy shifts, does procurement enable the shift or constrain it? Executives tend to care about this more than cost, because speed connects directly to revenue.
“Where’s the next advantage?” This is the innovation question. What is our supply base capable of that we’re not using? Which suppliers have technology, capacity, or expertise that could give us a competitive edge? Are we accessing our supply base strategically, or just transactionally? This is the question that separates procurement leaders who have a genuine seat at the table from those who get called in after decisions have been made.
Notice that savings isn’t one of the three. It’s assumed. It’s baseline. If you’re leading procurement and not delivering cost value, you have a different problem entirely. But if savings is all you bring to the boardroom, you’re answering a question that nobody in the room is asking.
The language shift matters more than most people realise. Stop saying “we saved €5M.” Start saying “we reduced single-source exposure from 34% to 18% while maintaining cost position.” Stop saying “we renegotiated supplier X.” Start saying “we restructured the supply base to support the growth target in Q3.”
It’s the same work. Different framing. And it changes how the C-suite sees your function entirely.
The procurement leaders I know who have genuine strategic influence didn’t get there by becoming better negotiators. They got there by learning to communicate in the language of business outcomes rather than procurement activities. That’s a skill worth developing deliberately.
Building your procurement leadership career
I didn’t plan a career in procurement. I started in sales and general management, moved through marketing and e-commerce, and eventually found my way into procurement because the problems were genuinely interesting and the impact was tangible in ways that other functions sometimes weren’t.
What I’ve learned along the way — through managing teams of over a hundred people at Apple, through building risk forecasting systems across a € multi-billion portfolio at ThyssenKrupp, through teaching strategy at ESB Business School, and through leading procurement at Thales Group — is that the career path in this function is far less linear than most people expect. And I’ve come to see that as an advantage, not a limitation.
If you’re building a procurement leadership career, here’s what I’d share.
Certifications matter, but selectively. A PMP credential signals project management discipline. A Lean Six Sigma Black Belt shows you can drive process improvement systematically. CIPS remains the gold standard for procurement-specific credentials in international contexts. But certifications alone don’t build careers — they signal capability. You still have to demonstrate it through the work.
Cross-functional experience is your accelerant. The procurement leaders who reach director and VP level almost always have meaningful experience outside of procurement — in finance, operations, product, or strategy. Anything that teaches you to speak multiple languages inside an organisation. My years in sales and marketing didn’t make me a better buyer. They made me a better business partner. That turned out to matter more.
Technical fluency is now non-negotiable. You don’t need to become a data scientist. But you need to understand how AI tools work, use them for spend analysis and market intelligence, and evaluate technology vendors without depending entirely on IT to tell you what’s possible. The leaders who resist this are going to find their teams moving around them rather than with them.
Your network is your early warning system. The best market intelligence I receive doesn’t come from databases or reports. It comes from conversations with other procurement leaders, suppliers, and industry contacts who trust me enough to share what they’re seeing. Build those relationships before you need them. Share knowledge generously. The procurement community is smaller than most people realise, and reputation compounds over time.
Own your narrative. Procurement still suffers from a perception problem in many organisations. If you don’t actively communicate your function’s strategic value, nobody will do it for you. Write about it. Present about it. Make it visible. The leaders who shape how procurement is perceived earn a kind of influence that no single negotiation can match.
The path from buyer to CPO isn’t a straight line. But the people who reach the top tend to share something in common: at some point, they stopped seeing themselves as procurement specialists and started seeing themselves as business leaders who happen to work through procurement.
That shift in identity changes everything. How you communicate. What you prioritise. Who you build relationships with. Where you invest your time.
Procurement leadership in 2026 isn’t about buying things more cheaply. It’s about making organisations more resilient, more adaptive, and more strategically capable through their supply base. That’s a leadership challenge worth building a career around.
Where this all connects
This guide covers the landscape. The individual articles go deep.
If you’re rethinking how your function is positioned, start with rethinking procurement leadership. If risk management is what keeps you thinking at night, seeing risk before it breaks you lays out the framework that changed my approach. If you’re finding it hard to get traction with stakeholders who don’t report to you, the influence without authority playbook is probably the most practical thing I’ve written.
For AI in procurement, there are two paths depending on where you are: the hybrid negotiation strategy gives you immediate tactical value, and the agentic AI overview helps you understand where the function is heading more broadly.
And if you’re thinking about what’s next in your career — whether that’s a director role, a CPO trajectory, or something different altogether — the hidden path from procurement to product leadership might reframe what’s possible in ways you haven’t considered.
Procurement leadership is changing faster than most people inside the function fully appreciate. The leaders who lean into that change — who push beyond savings, who build real risk visibility, who earn cross-functional trust, who integrate AI with judgment — are the ones who’ll shape what this role means for the next decade.
I don’t know exactly where this all goes. Nobody does yet.
But I’m increasingly convinced it’s somewhere worth leading toward.