Chapter 9Accountable
As the Chief Procurement Officer, Akmal considered himself more progressive than CPOs at other companies, and he had the suite of predictive AI tools to prove it.
“There's more to procurement than managing constraints and winning in the margins,” he had said to the Chief Financial Officer when making the case for the system. “We need more visibility into our supplier tiers, and we have got to be more nimble.”
The CFO was somewhat less than enthusiastic at first. What was a CPO doing thinking about AI anyway? After some convincing, however, the CFO signed off on the investment and the Chief Technology Officer joined the effort to bring AI to procurement at BAM, Inc.
Several months later, Akmal sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. There were no paper documents to push around, not even a spreadsheet on his desktop. Instead, Akmal opened a procurement program that took in bills of materials, autonomously scoured the networks for availability and cost, and made recommendations for what should be purchased from whom and sent to where. All in a day's work for an AI‐fueled procurement office.
Then the phone rang. It was the CFO, and he was not happy.
“Akmal, I'm looking at invoices for raw materials on the Anderson project, and we are paying nearly 15% more per ton than we were before your fancy new AI tools.”
“No, that can't be right,” said Akmal. “We have optimized for efficiency and timeliness, sure, but that couldn't possibly lead to such a large ...