Hi there,
I want to start this one with a confession, because I think you'll recognise yourself in it.
When I first started using AI properly on my own work - not a pilot, not a vendor demo, my actual Tuesday - it gave me back six to eight hours a week almost immediately. Quote normalisation. First-draft RFQs. Routine supplier correspondence. Contract clause extraction. The admin that had quietly eaten my week for twenty-eight years, mostly gone.
I should have been thrilled.
Instead, I did something I'm not proud of. I took every one of those reclaimed hours and filled them straight back up with more admin. More email. More reactive work. More of the same tasks — just faster.
I'd built myself a faster treadmill and called it transformation.
01 · The Treadmill Trap
The trap nobody warns you about
Here's the part the vendor demos skip. AI does not automatically make your week more strategic. Left to its own devices, it just makes the admin faster, and a faster treadmill is still a treadmill. You process more quotes, draft more documents, clear more inbox. The ratio of strategic work to busywork in your week doesn't budge. You've simply learned to run faster on the same spot.
I went looking to see whether this was just me being undisciplined. It isn't. It's happening across the whole function.
WHAT CROSSED MY DESK THIS WEEK
The Hackett Group's 2026 Procurement Agenda has procurement workloads rising 8% this year — while headcount falls and budgets contract. That's the pressure cooker every one of us is working inside. When time gets tight, the instinct is to pour any hour AI hands back into clearing the backlog faster.
And here's the tell: a benchmark of 121 procurement teams found that daily AI users score barely higher on readiness than people who don't use it at all. Using the tools more isn't the same as changing what the work is. That's the treadmill, measured at industry scale.
So if you've quietly felt that AI has made you busier rather than better — you're not doing it wrong. You're doing exactly what almost everyone does in month one. Including me.
The month it changed
What I did differently in month two
In my second month, I made one deliberate decision. Instead of letting the reclaimed hours leak back into the inbox, I named where they would go before I switched a single workflow on.
I picked three supplier relationships that had been running on autopilot for two years. Technically compliant. Commercially reasonable. But not actually managed — the kind of relationships you know you should be tending and never quite find the afternoon for.
The approach wasn't clever. More frequent touchpoints. More structured performance conversations. More genuine curiosity about their capacity pressures. More willingness to share our forward planning so they could plan better and deliver more reliably.
The next quarter's numbers were measurably better. Not because AI touched those relationships — it didn't. Because for the first time in two years, I had the time to do the work that actually mattered.
That's the whole point of this. Not faster administration. The space to do the green work — the negotiation, the risk calls, the relationships — that your experience was always for, and that never quite gets the hours it deserves.
Before you switch on a single AI workflow, ask yourself one question — and be honest about the answer:
"What will I do differently with the time this saves?"
If the answer is "handle more of the same, faster" — you're optimising the treadmill. If it names something specific — a relationship you've been neglecting, a category strategy still built on last year's assumptions, a negotiation you've only ever prepped in a rush — then you're using AI the way it's actually meant to be used.
Write your answer down before you automate anything. That one sentence is the difference between AI as a party trick and AI as the thing that finally gives you your week back.
I'll see you next week.
Start here: The Procurement Professional's AI Playbook
The full framework behind this issue — every task in your week rated RED 🔴, AMBER 🟡 or GREEN 🟢 for how much AI can genuinely replace it, plus a 30-day plan to put it to work. Free.
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— Carlo
THE SMARTER SUPPLY CHAIN
Practical AI for procurement and supply chain professionals. Written by a practitioner with 28 years in procurement and supply chain — no theory, no hype, no vendor spin. Human judgement over human time.
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