Chad Gaydos came to procurement the way many people do: accidentally, and then permanently.
Early in his career at SAP, he was handed procurement as his first process to learn. That was nearly 30 years ago. Today, Chad is the CEO of Procurify, an AI-enhanced procurement and AP automation platform built for the mid-market.
In a recent episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, he made a compelling case for why this particular moment in procurement's digital evolution is unlike anything that has come before it, and what separates the organizations that will benefit from AI from those that won't.
AI Isn’t Just Another ‘Tech Wave’
Procurement has been through technology waves before. ERP systems that digitized finance, and SaaS solutions that simplified deployment and improved usability. But Chad argues that AI represents something fundamentally different from either of those shifts. Previous technology investments were largely about recording activity and moving processes out of spreadsheets and email into a system of record. AI changes that equation entirely.
“Software is no longer just recording activity,” he said. “It's beginning to interpret and recommend actions.”
In procurement terms, that means moving from tracking spend to understanding spend, and eventually to getting better decision support on what to do with that spend. For example, for mid-market organizations that typically don't have large analytics teams, that shift can be significant. AI can function as a layer of intelligence that these companies simply haven't had access to before, which is a real game-changer for them.
The speed of that change is also worth noting. What used to take years in product development now moves in months. That pace creates enormous opportunity, but it also creates uncertainty, and Chad is clear-eyed about the fact that most procurement and finance leaders are holding both of those ideas at once right now.
The Trust Gap Is Real, but Not Impassable
Research from Procurify found that 37% of organizations are already using AI for spend visibility, but only 30% of those organizations actually trust the outputs. That’s a pretty significant gap, and it matters. Chad traces it back to a straightforward dynamic: trust always lags technology adoption.
Finance leaders are accountable for accuracy, compliance, and auditability. They can't rely on a black box. Understanding how AI arrived at a recommendation, not just that it arrived at one, is a prerequisite for building genuine confidence in the outputs, and that governance is what responsible adoption looks like.
For organizations that want to close the trust gap, Chad recommends starting with narrow use cases where outcomes are measurable, like invoice capture or spend classification. From there, establishing transparency is key: leaders need to be able to see and understand how the system is reaching its conclusions. And, of course, human oversight has to remain an important part of the equation. AI should augment decision-making, not replace all accountability. When organizations approach it that way, adoption and trust grow together at the same pace and for the good of the business.
Strategy Always Comes Before Technology
One of the more timely observations Chad makes is about the pressure procurement and finance leaders are now feeling from boards and CEOs to incorporate AI, often without many specifics about what that should look like in practice.
As he explains, IT budgets are growing around 7% per year, while AI budgets are growing at 100%. The organizational appetite is clearly there, but Chad's advice to leaders navigating that pressure is to focus on business outcomes first, then ask where AI can meaningfully improve them.
In procurement, those outcomes typically center on visibility, compliance, and cost control. If AI moves the needle on those things, it's worth deploying. If it doesn't, it's an experiment, not a strategy.
What Procurement Looks Like on the Other Side
Looking three to five years out, Chad sees AI absorbing more of the operational work that has historically consumed procurement teams, like data entry, invoice processing, policy checks, and routine approvals.
He's not predicting a smaller procurement function… just a different one.
The role, he argues, is going to make a complete shift from process manager to strategic advisor. Procurement professionals will have more time and more capacity to focus on things like supplier strategy, risk management, and cross-functional collaboration. In many ways, AI may finally allow procurement to operate at the level the business has always expected it to, but that the sheer volume of operational work has historically made it difficult to sustain.
In a refreshing take on AI, Chad isn’t offering a wholly cautionary tale about the technology, but instead giving procurement more nuanced reasons to engage with it seriously, govern it carefully, and build toward a more strategic future.
For more of this conversation, listen to Chad's full episode here.
