Forrester Procurement AI: CPOs Must Own the Strategy

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How Fragmented AI Ownership Undermines Procurement’s Strategic Value — and What Leaders Can Do About It

Based on insights from the Forrester Opportunity Snapshot: “Don’t Delegate AI,” commissioned by Zycus, February 2026 | Survey of 261 procurement leaders (director-plus)

Agentic AI is no longer a pilot experiment in procurement. It is actively reshaping how organizations interpret demand, execute sourcing, manage contracts, and process payments. Autonomous agents are making decisions that once required committee sign-off, and they are doing it faster than any human team could manage.

Yet the biggest risk facing procurement today is not that organizations are adopting AI too aggressively. It is that Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) are letting someone else — typically IT — define how that AI operates. According to a February 2026 Forrester study of 261 procurement leaders, responsibility for the procurement AI vision remains split between IT and procurement functions, creating a structural gap between who sets the strategy and who builds the system. This fragmented ownership is not just an organizational inconvenience. It is a strategic liability.

The Ownership Gap Is Real — and Measurable

The Forrester data is stark. While procurement leads in defining AI vision (42%) and blueprinting (38%), roughly one-third of organizations still defer these responsibilities to IT — 32% for vision-setting and 36% for blueprint planning. This means that in a significant number of enterprises, the people designing AI-driven procurement workflows do not carry the procurement mandate, do not understand the category nuances, and are not accountable for the outcomes those workflows produce.

When IT owns the procurement AI agenda, the result is often a technology-first deployment that optimizes for system performance rather than procurement value. Models get built around data availability rather than decision criticality. Escalation paths default to technical thresholds rather than business judgment. And the procurement team inherits a system they did not design, operating under rules they did not define.

For CPOs who want to retain strategic influence, this is the moment to step in. Platforms like Zycus’s Source-to-Pay suite are designed to give procurement leaders direct architectural control over AI-driven workflows — from spend analysis through to payment — without requiring IT to serve as a middleman for every configuration decision.

Vision Without Execution Is Delegation by Default

One of the study’s most revealing findings is the gulf between strategic ambition and executional readiness. Sixty-nine percent of procurement leaders express confidence in their AI vision, but only 31% are confident in their people and skills to deliver on it, and just 36% feel prepared to retrain AI models as requirements evolve. This gap means that even well-intentioned CPOs risk losing control by default — not because they chose to delegate, but because their organizations lack the capacity to execute.

This is why building an AI-ready culture matters as much as choosing the right technology. According to the study, 62% of procurement leaders have launched AI awareness programs, and 56% are aligning with IT and business units to establish shared goals. But awareness alone is insufficient. Procurement teams need tools that reduce the technical barrier to governing AI. Zycus’s Merlin Agentic AI Platform addresses this by offering a low-code orchestration environment where procurement admins can configure intelligent agents, define autonomous workflows, and set governance guardrails without deep technical dependencies.

Where AI Autonomy Should Expand — Under CPO-Defined Rules

The Forrester research confirms what practitioners already sense: AI autonomy should be calibrated to risk. Today, the strongest agentic AI deployments cluster in low-risk, rules-driven areas like spend-cost analysis (48% deployed), accounts payable automation (39%), and procure-to-pay (38%). High-value sourcing, decision escalation, and contract lifecycle management remain predominantly human-led — and for good reason.

But the areas where value leaks most — requirement scoping (48%), post-award compliance (48%), and obligation tracking (48%) — sit in a gray zone between transactional and strategic work. These are precisely the domains that need procurement-defined rules of engagement: what gets flagged, what gets escalated, and what the AI can act on independently. If those rules are set by IT or vendor defaults, organizations risk automating broken processes rather than fixing them.

Tools like Zycus’s AI-powered Spend Analysis and Merlin for Contracts embed intelligence directly into the lifecycle, allowing CPOs to define autonomy thresholds grounded in procurement judgment rather than generic technical parameters.

Tail Spend: The Proving Ground for Governed Autonomy

If there is a single domain where CPO-led AI governance can demonstrate immediate, measurable value, it is tail spend. The research reveals a striking 34-point gap: 52% of CPOs are comfortable with high AI autonomy in tail spend, yet only 18% have actually deployed it. Tail spend is high-volume, rule-based, and consistently leaky — making it structurally ideal for autonomous execution under clear guardrails.

Zycus’s Merlin Autonomous Negotiation Agent (ANA) is purpose-built for this challenge. It autonomously negotiates tail-spend purchases across price and non-price parameters like payment terms, warranties, and discounts, capturing savings that would otherwise go unaddressed. This is not about removing human judgment from procurement. It is about applying procurement judgment at scale, in areas where manual oversight is neither practical nor cost-effective.

Governance Must Be a Living System, Not a One-Time Exercise

Organizations are already investing in guardrails. The Forrester study shows that 53% use risk-based autonomy limits by category, 51% enforce duty separation between agents and approvers, and 50% conduct periodic model performance reviews. These are healthy signals of governance maturity.

But governance cannot be static. As AI capabilities evolve, the boundaries between human-led and AI-led work will shift. CPOs need a living governance model — reviewed quarterly, data-driven, and owned by procurement leadership. The preferred operating model among respondents reinforces this: 43% favor central governance with decentralized execution, meaning procurement sets the rules while domain teams innovate within those guardrails.

Achieving this model requires an integrated technology partner that serves as a single source of truth across the lifecycle. Zycus’s Agentic AI for Supplier Management and Procurement Analytics solutions provide the integrated data layer, governance tooling, and real-time visibility that CPOs need to scale AI without losing coherence.

The CPO’s Choice: Architect or Inherit

Agentic AI does not just execute procurement processes. It encodes procurement judgment into autonomous systems. The CPO who shapes that judgment — defining where autonomy accelerates, where humans intervene, and how governance evolves — will define procurement’s strategic value for the next decade.

Those who delegate these decisions to IT, to vendors, or to system defaults risk losing not only control of AI, but control of procurement itself. The path forward demands that CPOs treat agentic AI as a leadership discipline: investing in governance, cross-functional alignment, and platforms that put procurement at the center of AI decision-making.

The question is no longer whether AI will transform procurement. It is whether the CPO will be the architect of that transformation — or simply inherit what someone else built.

Source: Forrester Opportunity Snapshot, “Don’t Delegate AI: Why Procurement Leaders Must Personally Shape, Not Surrender, AI-Driven Decisions,” a custom study commissioned by Zycus, February 2026. Based on a survey of 261 procurement leaders (director-plus) across the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

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Zycus is a leader in Cognititive Procurement. A leading SaaS platform used by many large enterprises across the globe for enabling efficiency and effectiveness of the procurement function.