Stop Wasting Hours: How AI Agents Will Change Procurement Forever

Every procurement director I speak to says the same thing: time is slipping away in places it shouldn’t.

Not because teams aren’t working hard, but because so much of their week is lost to repetitive prep work, chasing information, and re-doing things that should have been solved once.

1. The Silent Killer: Time Drain Nobody Tracks

One director in Germany told me: “If I look at my team’s workload, at least 30% of their week is wasted on admin that doesn’t move a single negotiation forward.”

Another from the UK admitted: “We all talk about strategy, but in reality, half the week is firefighting and searching for information that should be at our fingertips.”

This isn’t about lack of effort. It’s about process friction. Time slips through cracks in calendar prep, stakeholder updates, and supplier back-and-forths.

2. Where AI Agents Step In

The promise of AI agents isn’t flashy dashboards. It’s cutting wasted hours from the system.

Imagine this:

• A Meeting Prep Agent that scans your calendar, pulls the last emails with attendees, and gives you a one-pager with context, risks, and smart questions.

• A Supplier Update Agent that auto-summarizes key supplier emails and flags changes against the contract.

• A Negotiation Prep Agent that builds a decision tree of likely supplier responses so you can plan before you enter the call.

There aren’t just ideas. It’s things we are already using. In fact, my team created an AI agent that sends you a 2-minute voice clip that prepares you for every upcoming meeting. 

Here’s how it works:

→ Every 5 minutes it checks if you have a meeting coming up in the next hour

→ If it finds a meeting, it pulls the essentials: attendees, agenda, and attached documents

→ It crawls your inbox to fetch the last 10 emails exchanged with those participants

→ With that context, it generates a short, clear, focused briefing

→ The briefing includes smart talking points and suggested questions

→ You receive it in both text and audio, so you can review at your desk or on the move

→ Meaning you can literally grab a coffee while listening to your prep

This is real. And it’s just one example.

I’m 100% confident you should block a few hours each week to brainstorm how AI agents can help you and your team. Get rid of the time-consuming ‘dumb’ work, so you can focus on the strategic/people part.

👉 Join the waitlist to learn how to build your own agents.

👉 Leading a team? Check out our AI Fundamentals for Procurement Teams Program. I’ll make sure you’re team will be trained on the above.

3. My Take: Procurement Can’t Afford This Waste Anymore

If every director I talk to agrees that 20–30% of team time is wasted, then ignoring AI agents is the same as accepting that waste. That’s one day a week gone.

The directors experimenting with agents already see the difference: less scrambling before meetings, faster stakeholder alignment, and more time spent on the parts of procurement that actually move the needle, like supplier strategy, market intelligence, and negotiations.

AI agents don’t solve everything, but they quietly cut the noise: flagging contract risks before they blow up, logging supplier updates automatically, and prepping draft responses so the team isn’t stuck in email all day.

The bottom line, however, is every hour wasted on repetitive admin is an hour not invested in strategy. In today’s environment, procurement teams can’t afford to keep losing that time.

4. Ask the Community: Where’s Your Biggest Time Sink?

Every procurement team has one task that eats up hours every week, whether it be chasing suppliers, updating trackers, or drafting the same stakeholder emails again and again.

✅ Where do you lose the most time?

✅ What’s the first agent you wish you had on your team?

PS: I received a ton of kind messages about the PDF we released with 25 AI interview Questions for Procurement Hires. In case you missed it, you can download it here.