What are we hiring for when the procurement function itself might look different in two years? Yesterday’s article looked at what 60+ live Nordic procurement job ads describe this summer. Some ads name explicit AI capability. Some name specific procurement platforms. Many describe procurement much as it looks today. All of them are being written now.
If we assume the Nordic procurement function will look and work differently in two or three years — which the analyst and vendor houses, and many of the practitioners themselves, suggest is possible — the reflection this opens is not “which ad got it right.” It is: hiring for a function whose exact shape we are still working out is genuinely open work. Worth thinking about together.
Three scenarios worth sitting with
The analyst and vendor houses describe several possible directions. None of them is a forecast. Together they mark out the range the Nordic procurement function could plausibly move within — and the ads being written today are hiring for one of them, whether the writer thought about it that way or not.
Agents inside the S2P stack run routine sourcing on their own within about two years. Non-strategic categories are largely automated. Category managers spend more time on strategy and business partnering, less on transactions. Teams are not larger but composed differently. This is close to the direction McKinsey describes when it maps the potential for significant efficiency gains as AI moves from experiment to operation.
Some parts of procurement get AI tools quickly — spend analytics, contract intelligence, supplier risk. Other parts, not at all. Some organisations build the underlying architecture (as Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise notes some are doing), others wait to see. Inside the same organisation, two realities live side by side. This is close to what the ad picture shows already.
Gartner’s 2026 Hype Cycle for Agentic AI places agentic AI at what it calls the Peak of Inflated Expectations — the stage where the promise runs ahead of what the technology is actually delivering. Gartner has also predicted that over 40 per cent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls. Research from Stanford Digital Economy Lab across 51 enterprise implementations observed that the technology is often the easiest part — roughly 77 per cent of the difficult work was invisible, in process redesign, data quality, and getting people to actually change how they work. In this scenario, many pilots stall. Regulatory and data-quality constraints slow adoption. AI ends up more coassistant than agent for years to come. Teams keep doing much of the work they do today, with modest gains.
None of these scenarios is more likely than the others in the abstract. Which lands depends on the organisation, the sector, the leadership, the data foundation, and the pace of what the tools themselves actually deliver. It probably lands differently for different Nordic companies at the same time.
What that opens for hiring for a role we’re still writing
Sitting with the three scenarios together, one reflection returns. Whichever scenario an organisation moves into, a shared question follows. How do we describe, recognise, and develop competence for a function whose exact shape we do not yet know? And how does hiring for it start to look different from hiring for the function we know today?
The question shows up in specific, concrete ways when reading the ads. “Experience with AI in procurement” is a phrase that could mean several things. Three years of active work with AI is a specific span; three years applied specifically to sourcing, category management, or contract intelligence is a different combination than three years of AI work in general. Which one is the ad describing? Do we look for someone who brings AI depth and add procurement, or someone with procurement depth and add AI, or for the people who have already done both? The answer probably depends on which scenario the organisation is quietly betting on.
The same reflection opens when specific platforms appear in the profile section. Coupa or SAP Ariba experience is one way to describe a body of work — and it can describe several different bodies of work depending on how the person used the platform. The same is true of “demonstrated business impact,” a phrase that appears in several of the ads. It is a rich phrase. What we recognise as evidence for it can look very different from one organisation to the next.
None of this is a critique of the ads. It is a reflection on where the language for hiring for the function of tomorrow sits today, given that the shape of the function itself is being worked out in real time by everyone at once.
Where the different perspectives sit alongside each other
The analyst voices, the vendor voices, the independent research and the practitioners are looking at the same underlying question from different vantage points. Each brings something the others do not. Reading them together — without one voice being right and another wrong — is where the reflection turns useful. The scenarios above are made possible by all of them describing what they see, from where they are.
Hiring for it — together at CPO Outlook 2026
Day 1 dedicates two sessions to this reflection — one on the certification of competence, one on the writing of the ad.
In the morning, Silf hosts a Theme Discussion — “What Will We Certify Next? Competences for the Procurement Organization We’re Building” — moderated by Christian Werngren, CEO of Sourca. The table starts from a specific observation Silf makes about European procurement certification: sustainability is about the only thing genuinely added to the certified core of procurement competence in recent years. Data, AI fluency, turning analysis into a decision others act on — the capabilities the wider conversation now revolves around — still live mostly at the edges: electives, short courses, learning on the job. The table asks the open question: as we build the next-generation organisation, what should we actually be certifying, and developing, next?
In the afternoon, Tobias Lindberg at Sandvik hosts a Peer Lab — “Who do you hire in 2027?” — that takes the same question into practice. The lab is a scenario exercise. It does not claim to know what procurement will look like two years from now. It starts from the same premise the analyst and vendor houses and the practitioners themselves are working with, and asks: if that turns out to be the direction, what does the job ad we write today need to look like?
Two rules keep the discussion honest. Value not efficiency: every capability in the ad connects to real value, not simply to time saved. Verifiable not claimable: every capability is something one could actually recognise in an interview or reference call. Both rules are ways of holding the reflection concrete.
Tobias brings his own Sandvik ad — the one with AI in the title — as a working example, along with the compromises he made and the choices he is still sitting with.
Around these two sessions, CPO Outlook 2026 gathers analyst voices, system vendors, transformation consultants, and practitioners — not to argue with each other, but because each brings a different perspective on the same underlying question. The morning table and the afternoon lab are where those perspectives meet the practical work of what we certify next, and what we are hiring for next. Participants leave with material to take back — a small set of capabilities they would put in their next real ad, each tied to a form of value and to a way of recognising it — informed by peers who face the same reflection.
The question of what to write in the next job ad is worth working on together. This is what will happen in Stockholm on 14 and 15 October.
About CPO Outlook 2026
CPO Outlook 2026 takes place at Hotel Birger Jarl in Stockholm on 14–15 October. Now in its 23rd edition, it is the annual gathering EBG builds each year around what senior Nordic procurement leaders most need to work through together. The programme mixes keynotes with sponsor-hosted Theme Discussions (including Silf’s table on what we certify next), practitioner-led Peer Labs (including Tobias Lindberg’s “Who do you hire in 2027?”), the inaugural Nordic CPO of the Year Award ceremony, and Day 2 plenary sessions and workshops. Participants leave with concrete material to take back to their own function. See the full programme and registration.
[…] 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 […]