BTW EP 27: Data or Delusion? Procurement’s Future Runs on Truth

Procurement doesn’t have a data problem. It has a data delusion.

For 25 years, the function has told itself the same story: if we can just clean up our spend, we’ll finally be in control. And yet here we are… swimming in the same dashboards, drowning in fields, and still struggling to answer a simple question: what do we spend?

In this episode of Buy: The Way…To Purposeful Procurement, Jason Busch, founder of Spend Matters and now a self-described builder of AI “co-workers,” returns to the podcast to pressure-test BuyLaw #5: “prioritize comprehensive, high-quality data.”

If procurement wants to operate in a world of AI employees, continuous validation, and P&L accountability, their data cannot remain partial, fragmented, or shaped by suppliers. 

Jason draws a sharp distinction between the roles or entities that manage procurement data: copilots, agents, and what he calls digital co-workers (multi-agent infrastructures capable of executing complex work autonomously). But all that capability comes with a catch. When the marginal cost of activity drops toward zero, the absolute risk of bad data increases exponentially.

Humans have the battle scars and the intuition to know when something isn’t quite right with the data. AI doesn’t, unless we explicitly teach it what ‘right’ looks like. That’s where procurement’s comfort with incomplete data becomes dangerous.

For decades, the function has relied on narrow slices of information: negotiated price, historical spend, maybe a market index or two, but in an AI-enabled world, that’s insufficient. Jason explains why context means everything – supplier financial health, commodity forecasts, tariffs, inventory signals, competitive pricing, risk data, contract performance signals, governance structures, and the cultural guardrails that determine how decisions are made.

If procurement feeds incomplete, biased, or poorly governed data into increasingly autonomous systems, those systems won’t just make mistakes faster; they’ll actually end up institutionalizing them and making procurement’s data problem unnecessarily worse.

Jason’s advice for procurement is pragmatic and urgent: set up a data governance committee tomorrow. Not to tidy historical spend, but to define what data matters, which sources are trustworthy, what tolerances exist for error, and at what point autonomous systems are allowed to act on that data.

In a world of digital co-workers, incomplete data isn’t a nuisance. It’s a real, human liability.

Links:

• Jason Busch on LinkedIn
• Rich Ham on LinkedIn
• Learn more at FineTuneUs.com