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February 25, 2026

Year Zero Autonomous Procurement: What CPOs Must Know

2026 is Year Zero for Autonomous Procurement — Are You Ready?

TL;DR Ardent Partners labels 2026 as “Year Zero” — the definitive departure from manual-first procurement. This isn’t incremental automation. It’s a structural shift to agentic AI systems that think, reason, and act without human prompts. Roughly 40% of enterprise spend remains unmanaged by the average procurement department. Autonomous AI agents can bring this spend under […]

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Why Gartner, Forrester, and IDC Are All in on Agentic Procurement

Why Gartner, Forrester, and IDC Are All in on Agentic Procurement

Over the past three decades, I’ve worked closely with procurement leaders and procure-tech providers through academic research, executive education, and advisory engagements. With the introduction of agentic AI, I’ve observed how procurement is adopting this emerging technology in novel ways that continue to evolve. One conclusion stands out: procurement is not constrained by data, dashboards,

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Secret of Procurement Orchestration

The Dirty Secret of Procurement Orchestration (Hint: It Doesn’t Orchestrate, Just Integrates!)

TL;DR The dirty secret of procurement orchestration is that most platforms fail in the “messy middle” — broken handoffs between agents leak negotiated savings, with organizations losing an average of 8.6% of total contract value annually to value leakage. The industry’s agent count arms race is misleading: many so-called “agents” are narrow automations repackaged with

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