Marijn Overvest just published his 12 Procurement Trends for 2026, and his analysis is spot-on. From explosive AI growth to agentic AI adoption, these trends will shape procurement’s future.
But as I reviewed his trends, I noticed something critical:
Every single trend assumes organizational readiness exists.
Let me show you what I mean.
THE READINESS GAP IN EACH TREND:
TREND 1: “Explosive Growth of AI-Powered Procurement Platforms”
Marijn’s insight: AI platforms are proliferating across procurement.
The readiness question: Before selecting an AI platform, has your organization assessed:
- Current process maturity (are processes stable enough to automate?)
- Data quality and availability (can your data feed AI effectively?)
- Change management capability (can your team absorb platform transformation?)
Without readiness assessment, you’re choosing platforms before confirming you can deploy them successfully.
Result: Another procurement platform joins the 70% that fail to deliver ROI.
TREND 2: “Procurement 5.0: AI Across Every Step of the Procurement Process”
Marijn’s insight: AI will integrate across the entire procurement lifecycle.
The readiness question: Each procurement step requires different organizational capabilities:
- Sourcing: Requires strategic thinking + supplier relationship management
- Contracting: Requires legal literacy + risk assessment
- P2P: Requires process discipline + exception handling
- Spend analytics: Requires data literacy + business acumen
Does your team have the baseline capabilities in each area to successfully layer AI on top?
Without readiness assessment, you’re automating processes your team doesn’t fully understand.
Result: AI amplifies existing dysfunction rather than eliminating it.
TREND 3: “From Generative AI to Agentic AI in Procurement”
Marijn’s insight: The shift from assistive AI (GenAI) to autonomous AI (Agentic) is accelerating.
The readiness question: Agentic AI requires exponentially higher organizational readiness:
- Governance structures: Who oversees autonomous decisions?
- Risk tolerance: Can leadership accept AI making decisions without human approval?
- Exception handling: What happens when the AI agent encounters edge cases?
- Accountability frameworks: Who’s responsible when the agent makes a mistake?
If your organization struggles with GenAI governance, how will you handle autonomous agents?
Without readiness assessment, you’re giving decision-making authority to AI in organizations that can’t govern it.
Result: Agentic AI creates compliance risks, vendor conflicts, or budget overruns.
TREND 4: “Growing Importance of Risk Management in AI Adoption”
Marijn’s insight: Risk management is becoming central to AI strategy.
The readiness question: This IS the readiness assessment trend.
Risk management in AI adoption means assessing:
- Technical risks: Data security, model bias, integration failures
- Organizational risks: Change resistance, capability gaps, governance failures
- Strategic risks: Misalignment with business objectives, vendor lock-in
Readiness assessment = proactive risk management.
Without it, you’re managing risks reactively (after AI deployment fails) rather than proactively (before deployment begins).
Result: You discover you weren’t ready AFTER spending $5-10M.
TREND 10: “Digital Literacy as the New Talent Benchmark for Organizational Change”
Marijn’s insight: Digital literacy is becoming the critical skill for procurement professionals.
The readiness question: Before deploying AI tools that require digital literacy:
- What’s your team’s current digital literacy baseline?
- How wide is the gap between current and required literacy?
- Do you have training programs to close that gap?
- How long will it take to build the necessary literacy?
Without readiness assessment, you’re deploying AI tools to teams that can’t use them effectively.
Result: AI adoption stalls because the team lacks foundational digital skills.
TREND 11: “CPO Leading Teams in Technology and Organizational Change”
Marijn’s insight: CPOs must lead both technology adoption and organizational transformation.
The readiness question: To lead effectively, CPOs need:
- Visibility into current organizational capabilities
- Quantified assessment of readiness gaps
- Roadmap for building missing capabilities
- Metrics to track readiness improvement over time
Without readiness assessment tools, CPOs are leading change without a map.
Result: CPOs make gut-feel decisions about readiness rather than data-driven ones.
THE PATTERN IS CLEAR:
Every trend Marijn identified is prescriptive (tells you WHAT to do):
- Adopt AI platforms
- Implement AI across procurement lifecycle
- Transition to agentic AI
- Manage AI risks
- Build digital literacy
- Lead organizational change
But none are PREDICTIVE (tells you IF you CAN):
- Are we ready for AI platforms?
- Do we have capability for end-to-end AI?
- Can we govern agentic AI?
- Do we have the literacy to use AI tools?
- Does our organization have capacity for this change?
That’s the missing Trend #0: Organizational Readiness Assessment Before AI Deployment
WHAT MARIJN GOT RIGHT:
In his post, Marijn emphasizes:
- Governance: Clear rules build confidence
- Metrics: Measure what matters
- Learning loops: AI capability is a practice, not a project
He’s absolutely correct.
But here’s the critical question his framework assumes has already been answered:
Does your organization have the capability to implement governance, design meaningful metrics, and create learning loops?
His three pillars require organizational readiness:
Governance requires:
- Leadership alignment on risk tolerance
- Culture that accepts guardrails
- Cross-functional collaboration
Metrics require:
- Data literacy across the team
- Systems that capture workflow impact
- Discipline to measure what matters vs. what’s easy
Learning loops require:
- Psychological safety to share failures
- Knowledge management systems
- Time and resources for documentation
Without these prerequisites, even “disciplined AI adoption” fails.
THE SOLUTION: PHASE 0 READINESS ASSESSMENT
Before pursuing any of Marijn’s 12 trends, organizations should answer one question:
“Are we organizationally FIT to execute this trend successfully?”
Hansen Fit Score assesses 23 organizational characteristics across:
- Leadership alignment and capability
- Cultural readiness for change
- Process maturity and stability
- Technical infrastructure
- Team capability and capacity
- Change management discipline
The assessment produces a quantified readiness score (0-10 scale):
- FIT Score > 7.5: Proceed with AI deployment (75-85% success probability)
- FIT Score 6.0-7.5: Build capability first, then deploy (reduces risk)
- FIT Score < 6.0: Don’t proceed yet – address fundamental gaps
This is Trend #0: The prerequisite that determines if Trends 1-12 succeed or fail.
HOW THIS CHANGES THE 2026 ROADMAP:
OLD APPROACH (Technology-First):
- Read Marijn’s trends
- Choose which trends to pursue (AI platforms, agentic AI, etc.)
- Deploy technology
- Discover readiness gaps after spending millions
- 70% failure rate
NEW APPROACH (Readiness-First):
- Read Marijn’s trends
- Run Hansen Fit Score assessment
- IF FIT Score > 7.5: Pursue trends with confidence
- IF FIT Score 6.0-7.5: Build capability in parallel with gradual adoption
- IF FIT Score < 6.0: Address fundamental gaps before pursuing trends
- 75-85% success rate
THE BOTTOM LINE:
Marijn’s 12 Procurement Trends for 2026 are excellent.
They tell you WHERE procurement is heading and WHAT you should do.
But they don’t tell you IF you’re ready to get there.
That’s not Marijn’s fault – trend forecasting is about identifying patterns, not assessing individual organizational readiness.
But it is YOUR responsibility as a procurement leader to ask:
“Before we chase these trends, are we organizationally FIT to execute them?”
Because the difference between procurement teams that lead in 2026 and those that fall behind won’t be about which trends they chose.
It will be about whether they assessed readiness before deployment.
CLOSING:
Thank you to Marijn Overvest for publishing the Procurement Trends 2026 Report. His framework on governance, metrics, and learning loops is essential reading for every procurement leader.
I’m simply adding the missing Trend #0:
Assess organizational readiness BEFORE pursuing any trend.
Your 2026 success depends on it.
TODAY’S TAKEAWAY
A PERSONAL LESSON FROM 5K TO 21K:
As a runner of 5K, 10K, and 21K races, I know one thing: regardless of the distance or the day, if I didn’t train, I wouldn’t be able to finish a race, let alone win it.
You have to prepare, plan, and be ready to run a race of any length. Otherwise, you’ll never finish it – let alone finish in the top 10.
AI adoption is no different.
You can’t skip the training phase (readiness assessment) and expect to finish the race (successful AI deployment).
The procurement teams that lead in 2026 won’t be the ones who started the AI race first.
They’ll be the ones who trained properly before the starting gun.
Procurement Insights 
Tim Cummins
November 3, 2025
As always, you are right to observe the key dependency on readiness. If you haven’t got the competency, who is going to give you the job? And who is going to listen to you?
I suggest there’s another fundamental omission. The list appears to be very input driven. If Procurement really wants status and influence, it has to start demonstrating its contribution to outputs and outcomes – taking responsibility for results.
piblogger
November 3, 2025
Tim Cummins – thank you for this. You’ve just identified the missing link between readiness assessment and transformation success.
Your observation: “If you haven’t got the competency, who is going to give you the job? And who is going to listen to you?”
This is precisely why readiness assessment matters BEFORE deployment:
Without competency (readiness), organizations deploy transformations that:
Can’t execute (lacking capability)
Can’t influence (lacking credibility)
Can’t deliver (lacking results)
Your second point is even more critical:
“The list appears to be very input driven. If Procurement really wants status and influence, it has to start demonstrating its contribution to outputs and outcomes.”
This is exactly the pattern I’ve been documenting:
Organizations measure ACTIVITY (features deployed, processes improved) but not READINESS (can we execute successfully?) or OUTCOMES (what results did we deliver?).
The sequence should be:
Phase 0: Assess readiness (competency, capability, credibility)
Phase 1: Deploy inputs aligned with readiness (technology, processes, skills)
Phase 2: Measure outputs and outcomes (business results, value delivered)
Most organizations skip Phase 0, deploy Phase 1 inputs, then wonder why Phase 2 outcomes don’t materialize.
Because without Phase 0 readiness assessment, there’s no foundation for accountability.
You can’t hold people accountable for outcomes if they were never ready to execute in the first place.