Agents on the agenda, Excel in the ad

In 2024, the room expected AI to change procurement a lot, and mostly used it to write. In 2026, agents in procurement are on the agenda, and the job ads still name Excel. What does that gap tell us? There are at least four readings. Nobody knows yet which one is right.

A CPO Outlook 2026 discussion piece · EBG | Network

At CPO Outlook 2024, EBG asked the room three questions about AI. How much will it change the way you work? How is it affecting your organisation today? And where should it make a difference? One answer could stand for many of the others: “Very little today, but huge impact tomorrow!”

Two years is a long time in this field. In 2024, the conversation was about licences and pilots. In 2026, agents in procurement are on conference agendas and in vendor roadmaps. Yet when EBG read more than 60 live Nordic procurement job ads this summer, most described a role that would have looked familiar in 2024.

This piece puts the three side by side: what the room said then, what has moved since, and what the job ads describe now. Then it asks what the gap tells us.

What the room said in 2024

The first question asked how much AI and generative AI would affect the way people work, and what they do, in procurement. 101 people answered. Nobody chose “not much”.

The second question asked how AI was affecting their procurement organisation that day. The third asked where AI can or should make a difference. Every answer is shown below, grouped by EBG.

Reading the 2024 answers

Three things stand out. The first is the distance between expectation and use. Of the 98 answers about AI that day, 29 said in one form or another: not yet. Another 22 were about text: writing, summarising, proofreading, presentations. Sixteen described procurement work itself, such as contract reading, spend classification or a faster RFx process.

The second is what people named. Copilot, ChatGPT, an enterprise licence, “Built into many applications”. AI maturity was counted in licences. Nobody mentioned agents. “Autonomous sourcing” appears once, as a wish for the future.

The third is the future people pictured. It was mostly the floor of the job: contracts, tail spend, admin, invoices, procure-to-pay. One answer describes the model behind many of the others.

In that picture, AI lightens the job. The roles stay as they are, and the experts get time back. One person had already noticed something else: “Spending more time on filtering”.

Two years on

The vocabulary has moved. At CPO Outlook 2026, a Day 2 panel asks “Which road to AI? Who builds it, who owns it — and who answers for it”. Coupa hosts a roundtable called “The Human-Agent Balance: Grounding Automation in Day-to-Day Procurement Practice”. Zycus hosts one called “Procurement’s Autonomous Shift: The AI Tour for Leaders Building Unified, Intelligent, Outcome-Led S2P”. In 2024, nobody in the room used that language.

And agents are being built. On the same panel, Joel Andersson of Inter IKEA opens with an agent built from inside indirect procurement that guides colleagues to the right way to buy. Jatin Singhal’s team at The Adecco Group builds agents for its daily work.

Use has moved less. In EBG’s Xperience survey in spring 2026, 47 senior procurement professionals described how far AI had come in their function. Most were exploring, or using AI in specific areas such as contracts and spend. Only 2% described AI as embedded in how they work and decide.

Hiring has moved least. Reading more than 60 live Nordic procurement job ads this summer, EBG found most describing “Category strategy, supplier negotiation, cross-functional stakeholder alignment. Years of experience as the qualifier.” And: “Excel and Office as the named tools.”

Where AI does appear, it sits in a few roles. Ericsson’s Head of Sourcing Digital Transformation is to lead the evolution to an AI-enabled operating model. Sandvik’s Indirect Sourcing role has AI in the title, with Microsoft Copilot named as required. The licence of 2024 has become a requirement in a 2026 ad.

Four ways to read the gap

It would be easy to call this a contradiction. EBG is not sure it is. There are at least four readings, and each points to a different next step. In August, EBG looked at how fast adoption might go. These readings ask something else: how the agenda and the ad can differ at the same time.

Nobody knows yet

Each reading has some support. None can be proven from the outside. They do not exclude each other either: a function can build agents centrally, redefine roles quietly and still post an ad that reads like 2022.

What changes between the readings is the next step. If the first is right, the question is ownership. If the second, it is an operating model decision. If the third, it is how you develop the people you have. If the fourth, it is mostly time.

One question sits underneath all four, and the 2024 answers never raised it. If agents take the floor of the job, where do new procurement professionals learn the craft? The floor is where most of today’s experts started.

EBG has asked this year’s CPO Outlook participants how far agents have come in their own functions. The answers will be shared in the room.

Where the question goes next

None of these sessions will settle which reading is right. What the room can do is show where comparable functions are, and what they have chosen to change first.