886: The AI Performance Gap: What Procurement Leaders Are Doing Differently W/ Christopher Sawchuk

"It has to start with the business outcomes that we want. This becomes an operating model decision. Technology has to support the operating model that we're designing." - Christopher Sawchuk, Principal and Global Procurement Advisory Practice Leader at The Hackett Group AI adoption is quickly becoming commonplace in procurement, but the biggest performance gap is in how some organizations are using it to rethink the entire way procurement work gets done. For procurement leaders, the next stage of AI maturity may have less to do with finding another use case and more to do with reconsidering how the function should operate when AI is embedded into the work itself. In this episode, Philip Ideson is joined by Christopher Sawchuk, Principal and Global Procurement Advisory Practice Leader at The Hackett Group, to discuss findings from The Hackett Group's AI World Class Procurement research and what they reveal about the next stage of procurement's AI journey. Chris explains why many organizations remain focused on incremental productivity improvements while leading teams are beginning to redesign workflows, operating models, staffing approaches, and performance measures around AI. They also explore what happens to the capacity AI creates, why pilots don't necessarily translate into transformation, and how procurement leaders can prepare their organizations for a future that remains difficult to predict. In this episode, Chris discusses how to: -Move beyond AI experimentation toward work redesign -Turn AI-created capacity into higher-value procurement work -Design an operating model where technology supports the desired way of working -Identify where AI can have the greatest impact across procurement processes   Links: Christopher Sawchuk on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-sawchuk/  Subscribe to the AOP Newsletter: https://resources.artofprocurement.com/art-of-procurement-podcast-subscribe  Subscribe to Art of Procurement on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ArtofProcurement