Where does procurement’s time actually go?

Procurement has been given a bigger job. Ask where the week goes, and the answer has barely moved. The more useful question is why.

A CPO Outlook 2026 discussion piece · EBG | Network

For years, Anna Bjärkerud, founder of EBG | Network, has asked procurement leaders the same three questions. What does your organisation spend its time on? What would you like to spend it on instead? And what should go?

The answers have a shape that barely changes. When leaders put a number on it, she has heard 10% strategic and 90% ad hoc. She has heard 40% strategic. She has not, in any room, heard a majority. And she still hears the same today.

Over the same years, procurement has taken on supplier risk, sustainability, resilience and a growing share of the company’s AI agenda. CIPS’ Global State of Procurement & Supply 2026 reports that one in three respondents now reports to the chief executive, managing director or owner, up from 15% the year before. The mandate has grown. The week, it seems, has not.

This piece looks at what procurement leaders have actually said, in 2023 and again in 2025 and 2026. Then it asks the behavioural question underneath: why does the split hold, while technology comes and goes?

What they said in 2023

At CPO Outlook 2023, EBG ran a workshop together with Chr. Hansen and Deloitte, and the same three questions went to its participants as a live poll. What does procurement in your organisation spend the most time on? What should it spend more time on? And what tasks would you like to remove from your function?

Thirty-one people answered the first question, 30 the second and 25 the third. Every answer is shown below, grouped by EBG.

Read the first tab and one answer stands out: “Discussing not acting”. Read the third and another: “Police”. Neither is a task. Both describe a role that the organisation has come to expect.

Then there is “Extra contracts due to undisciplined forecasting”. That work starts somewhere else in the company and lands in procurement. So does “Answering questions from the organization”.

The same job, one step earlier

Put the first two lists side by side and a pattern appears. Most of what people want more time for is not a different job. It is the same job, done earlier in the process.

Two things follow from that. First, the move people want is upstream, not sideways. Nobody asked to stop negotiating. They asked for time to prepare.

Second, the insight people want is built from the data they want to be rid of. “Data digging” and “Cleaning and gathering data” sit on the removal list. “Supplier relationship and supply chain insight” sits on the wish list. Insight is processed data. Someone still has to own the processing, or understand it well enough to check what a tool produces.

And since

Two years later, the same pattern came back in EBG’s own surveys, asked in different words.

In the CPO Outlook 2025 pre-summit survey, with 58 responses from 47 companies, 62% named resource overload as a top operational bottleneck: too many tasks, too reactive, too little time for strategy. Asked what they would stop and start if they could reinvent their role, respondents wrote this:

“Firefighting created by other functions” is the 2023 answer about undisciplined forecasting, two years on.

In spring 2026, EBG’s Xperience survey of 48 senior procurement professionals asked a sharper question. When there is a clear opportunity or risk in front of your team, but action is slower than it should be, what is most often the real reason?

The top two answers are not about skills or tools. They are about the week being full, and the organisation around it. One respondent put it directly: “Our biggest challenge is not lack of capability, but lack of authority and early involvement.”

Not only in the Nordics

Larger surveys point the same way. Deloitte’s 2021 Global CPO Survey, with over 400 responses from 40 countries, found procurement teams spending 74% of their time on transactional and operational work.

Deloitte asked again in 2023, with almost 350 responses from more than 40 countries. The 2023 Global CPO Survey shows the strategic share barely moving.

Even the best-performing group in Deloitte’s 2023 survey spends well under half its time on strategic work. In its 2025 survey of more than 250 CPOs, Deloitte describes its leading group as still spending roughly two-thirds of its time on non-strategic work. The same report notes that procurement keeps taking on new responsibilities, from resilience and third-party risk to sustainability and IT sourcing.

A caution. No survey EBG has found asks the same question every year back to 2010. The claim that nothing has changed cannot be proven from outside data. What can be said is narrower: in 2021 and 2023, Deloitte put strategic work at under a third of procurement time, and well under half even for the leaders, while the job kept growing.

Why it looks like this

Technology has arrived in waves: e-sourcing, suites, analytics, robotic automation and now AI. Each promised time back. The split held. Behavioural and organisational research offers several reasons, and none of them is a lack of will.

Where the saved hour goes

EBG has long asked whether AI will actually give procurement time back. The research so far suggests caution.

Using Danish register data, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard found widespread use of generative AI, but no measurable change in earnings or recorded hours. Employers absorbed the technology by reorganising tasks, including new work in AI oversight and integration. Among users, 85% said they moved the time they saved to other work tasks. Fewer than one in ten used it for breaks.

Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye of UC Berkeley Haas looked closer. For eight months they followed a US technology company of about 200 people, observing daily work and interviewing more than 40 employees. Reporting in Harvard Business Review in February 2026, they found that employees using AI worked faster, took on a broader scope and stretched work across more of the day, often without being asked. Work moved into lunch breaks and evenings, and people ran AI tasks in the background while doing other work. It is one company and one method, but it shows the mechanism up close.

Nordic procurement expects the opposite. In the CPO Outlook 2025 survey, 72% pictured AI handling routine work so people can focus on strategy. In the Xperience 2026 survey, 29% said they already save four hours or more a week with AI, and 67% expect to within two years.

In EBG’s reading, both can be true at once. What took time takes less, and the time is absorbed by expectations of more, unless someone decides otherwise.

What this means for you

If the split is built by the organisation, it will not be fixed by a tool alone. It moves when someone decides where freed time goes, and then protects that decision after the project ends. Perlow’s study suggests the second part is where most attempts fail.

Where the question goes next

CPO Outlook 2026 is built around the double task this piece describes: running the function as it is, and building the one it needs, with the same people.

None of these sessions will settle the split for anyone. What the room can do is show where comparable functions actually are, and how a few of them have moved the line.