Agentic artificial intelligence, geopolitical uncertainties and energy acquisition are the three biggest issues facing supply chain procurement professionals, says Ryan Polk, senior director analyst at Gartner.

There’s a lot of “AI washing” today, Polk says. “Organizations, vendors, suppliers are all advertising that everything is an agent today, when that's really not the case. An agent is an AI model that has the ability to perceive an environment and act on that environment independently of a human prompt. That's really the key defining characteristic of an agent —being able to manage and operationalize tasks.”

The industry is already seeing the emergence of some narrowly focused agents, helping to autonomously negotiate with suppliers or building market research reports based on publicly available data and providing those to category, supplier and sourcing managers. “There's a whole host of new agent capabilities coming down the pike in terms of procurement, co-pilots and different things of that nature,” Polk says. 

If anything complicates procurement professionals’ lives, it’s geopolitical uncertainties, not least tariffs. Says Polk: “The advice that I would give a procurement leader is, one, have your go-now strategy. What are those actions you would take regardless of any scenario that could unfold if tariffs or trade policies increase or if they go away tomorrow? Number two, have some scenario-specific plans ready to go. If we start to see things moving left, right, up or down, what would we do? Those are the sorts of strategic actions I think the best organizations use to separate themselves from everyone else.”

As for energy, demand for it is skyrocketing. “We use more power than ever before,” Polk says, “but the supply side of the equation is incredibly uncertain right now. So how can we look at that category as more of a strategic thing within our organization, as opposed to just paying the bills, paying the utility providers?”