The pace of change in procurement feels like it’s never been faster. According to David Loseby, former CPO, behavioral science Ph.D., and self-described ‘pracademic,’ the pace we're experiencing today may be the slowest we will experience going forward.
Let that sink in for a moment… today’s pace will feel slow in retrospect.
In a recent episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, David made the case that procurement's future will demand far more than incremental adaptation, and that the leaders who thrive will be the ones who understand that the human side of this equation matters just as much (sometimes more?) as the technology.
Procurement 2035
David's perspective has been shaped by a broad career spanning property and construction, pharmaceuticals, change management, and ultimately procurement and supply chain, alongside academic work in behavioral science. That combination gives him a distinctive lens on what is driving change in the profession, and what procurement leaders need to do about it.
The Half-Life of Skills Is Shrinking
Around the year 2000, David recalled, the World Economic Forum estimated that the half-life of professional skills was roughly 20 years. This meant practitioners had about a decade before they needed to significantly refresh their knowledge and capabilities. By the time COVID happened, that number had dropped to five years. By 2028 or 2029, the expected half-life will be closer to three years.
“Simply doing more of the same is simply not sufficient. An awful lot is going to change in that time period, way beyond anything that we've experienced.”
Teams that are waiting for the pace of change to slow down, or hoping that a modest investment in AI tools will be enough to stay competitive, are likely underestimating what the next decade will require. David describes the shift as tectonic, not incremental, and argues that procurement needs to rethink not just what they do, but how they think about their own future.
AI as Partner, Not Replacement
David also made some nuanced points about the nature of the relationship between experienced practitioners and AI. The value of that partnership, he argues, depends heavily on the human side of it. AI is only as useful as the quality of the questions being asked and the judgment being applied to the outputs.
For example, he says, asking an AI model to generate useful content without being precise about the parameters is a bit like going shopping for haircare products and wandering into the garden section. “You have to be really clear and say you must look in this aisle,” he said. “Anything that might be fertilizer from aisle 23 somewhere else is not acceptable. It might look the same, it might be in a plastic container just the same, but it isn't the same.”
That may seem like an obvious point, but making this type of distinction in the ‘real’ world of procurement and AI requires experience and judgment. It requires someone who knows enough about the subject matter to be able to tell when an output is wrong or when a hallucinated citation points to a paper that doesn't actually exist.
We know AI makes mistakes, and the experienced procurement professional, far from being made redundant by AI, becomes the quality control layer that builds trust in the technology and, ultimately, makes it valuable.
When Personality Becomes a Professional Assets
David references the ‘big five’ personality traits to make the case that openness, conscientiousness, and what he calls genuine humility are going to become increasingly important differentiators for procurement leaders navigating this level and rate of change.
A closed mindset, he says, one that defaults to “we did it this way last year, so we'll do it this way again,” is a liability and an active impediment to procurement’s success (and the business as a whole, for that matter. Similarly, leaders who rely on commanding compliance rather than earning engagement are going to find themselves increasingly isolated, both from their teams and from the business.
“People typically work for other people, not necessarily for organizations per se,” David said. “The poor leadership that we've seen starts to get called out much sooner, much quicker, and becomes a differentiator, particularly when we're looking for competitive advantage.”
How Procurement Leadership Should Respond
The thread running through David's perspective is that CPOs of the future will need to be as fluent in human dynamics as they are in technology and commercial strategy. Org charts may eventually include AI agents performing specific roles alongside human colleagues, and in many cases, this is already happening.
In response, governance frameworks will need to account for how those agents are directed and held accountable, by humans. And through all of it, the leaders who are trusted and genuinely respected for how they operate will be the ones who hold everything together.
In this context, a sourcing hero, as David puts it, is someone who becomes respected for what they do and how they do it, not because of their job title or the fact that they're the final signatory on a contract. In a world that is changing this fast, that kind of reputation is built on behavior, not authority. And it may be the most durable competitive advantage procurement has.
For the full conversation, listen to David's episode of The Sourcing Hero here:
