Boston Consulting Group’s 2026 Tech Procurement Study<\/a>, which I contributed to, we surveyed more than 200 procurement professionals and interviewed industry leaders and technology providers. Most enterprises surveyed are already piloting or deploying agentic AI in procurement.<\/p>\nOverseas, the question is no longer whether to adopt agentic AI, but how to redesign the procurement organisation to get the most from it.<\/p>\n
How AI can help firms absorb shocks<\/p>\n
For New Zealand firms, distance means longer lead times and fewer alternatives when things go wrong. The faster a business can identify a problem and find, vet and contract another supplier, the better placed it is to respond.<\/p>\n
Manually, that cycle takes weeks. A risk-monitoring agent can scan shipping data, news feeds and supplier registers around the clock, compressing detection to hours. A supplier-discovery agent can assemble and pre-screen alternatives in days.<\/p>\n
AI can also give smaller procurement teams capabilities previously available mainly to large companies. Most New Zealand companies can’t afford the large sourcing and supplier-management teams of the multinationals they buy from and sell to. A three-person team could potentially do work that once required many more staff.<\/p>\n
The main barriers are within businesses themselves. Our respondents identified fragmented data, outdated software and governance as key problems. Some 71 percent cited trust in autonomous decision-making as a barrier, alongside security, regulatory uncertainty, accountability and auditability.<\/p>\n
One finding is particularly relevant for New Zealand firms, most of which will buy this capability rather than build it. Performance outcomes were similar whether agentic AI was developed in-house, co-developed with a partner or bought as a managed service.<\/p>\n
Buying a capable solution is a perfectly good way to start. But a large gap emerged in companies’ own AI expertise: 46 percent of in-house builders rate their internal capability as fully sufficient, against 7 percent of co-developers and 6 percent of outsourcers – and in-house organisations run the most autonomous agents.<\/p>\n
That suggests firms can buy the technology, but still need people who understand how it works, the data it relies on and the decisions it makes. Building that expertise will allow them to give AI agents more responsibility safely.<\/p>\n
![\"ChatGPT,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1790416816_799_4JIBR7O_AFP__20260910__dellatorre_notitle260909_npDXv__v1__MidRes__ChatgptClaudeGeminiAndGro_jpg.jpeg\")
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ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok apps on a phone screen.<\/p>\n
Matteo Della Torre \/ NurPhoto via AFP<\/p>\n
From risk to resilience<\/p>\n
For New Zealand procurement leaders, the lesson is to look at the whole procurement process, rather than automate individual tasks.<\/p>\n
Procurement and IT need to work together, staff need the skills to manage the technology, and firms should plan from the start for successful trials to expand into everyday use.<\/p>\n
For boards and executives, the message is simpler. Every scenario exercise run since Covid-19 has concluded that New Zealand needs more resilient supply chains.<\/p>\n
Resilience in procurement is built transaction by transaction. The technology to transform that function is ready, and international organisations already using it are gaining experience that latecomers cannot simply buy.<\/p>\n
In a country whose prosperity depends on goods moving across the world’s longest and most exposed supply lines, giving procurement the intelligent agents it needs is a question of national economic resilience.<\/p>\n
* Ilan Oshri is Professor of Information Systems, Auckland Business School, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau.<\/p>\n
– This story originally appeared on The Conversation<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Analysis: If 2026 has taught New Zealand businesses anything, it’s that the next supply chain shock is never…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-612296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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