Beyond the Pilot: Building a Procurement Function That Runs on AI

What it really takes to move from a promising pilot to a procurement function that runs on AI, with a practitioner and a product leader in the room.

Most procurement teams have run an AI pilot by now, and many have had an early win. The harder question is what comes next. How do you move past a successful proof of concept and build a function where AI is not a tool you bolted on, but the way the work actually gets done? In this ISM Houston session, a live poll showed nearly half the room is still early on that journey.

This on-demand panel brings together two perspectives that rarely share a stage: Peter Dill, a veteran procurement and supply chain leader and past President of ISM Houston, and Saquib Jawed, Director of Product Management at Zycus. Together they skip the hype and get practical about where AI genuinely helps, where humans stay in control, and what it takes for it to stick.

What you’ll take away:

• Why most AI pilots stall after early success, and what separates the teams that scale from the ones that don’t
• The plain-English difference between automation and autonomy, and where each one belongs in procurement
• Where AI delivers real value across the Source-to-Pay core: intake, sourcing, contracting, and P2P
• How to build trust in AI output without re-checking everything, and where governance should draw the line
• What a mid-level procurement professional should learn now to stay valuable as routine work shifts to AI

A candid, example-driven discussion for anyone moving procurement from experimenting with AI to running on it.