# The stars have aligned for procurement: CIPS CEO Ben Farrell on AI and the rise of the CPO

Published on July 23, 2026

## **1. AI takes on the work humans should never have been doing**

Over the last 18 months, the mood has moved around AI from threat to opportunity. His framing, borrowed from a peer: AI is "doing all the jobs a human should never have done."

Automating the manual work frees procurement people to do what only people can — make the judgement calls, build the relationships, and manage the supplier network on which a business actually relies on. Farrell describes a "supply web" rather than a supply chain, and compares the future of sourcing to Netflix. You feed in your requirements, whether cost, timing or sustainability, and the system serves up options, flags when a supplier becomes risky or suboptimal, and points you elsewhere.

In other words, AI won't take procurement jobs; it'll hand people better ones.

## **2. The stars have aligned for procurement**

Farrell's bigger argument is that several forces have lined up at once to push procurement up the agenda:

- **Geopolitical disruption.** Supply shocks and financial uncertainty have grown in frequency and impact year on year since 2008, and boards now turn to procurement and robust [third-party risk management](/content/products/third-party-risk-management/index.html) for certainty.
- **The shape of modern business.** S&P 500 companies spent almost nothing on third parties in 1950; today, third-party spend sits at around 70%. Organisations have become networks of other organisations, and procurement leaders are the people orchestrating them. It's why running Apple's supply chain set Tim Cook up to run Apple.
- **Demographics and climate.** By 2050 the world will hold 9.7 billion people, 70% of them in cities, all needing water, food, energy and raw materials that have to be sourced — while supply chains account for roughly 90% of global emissions.

These forces were already reshaping the profession, and AI is accelerating every one of them.

## **3. The CPO is moving from the CFO's shadow to the CEO's side**

One consequence runs through all of it: where the chief procurement officer (CPO) sits. For years, CPOs reported to the CFO. That is changing fast. CIPS' data shows 75% of CPOs no longer sit under the finance function, up from 47% in 2024, and the share reporting directly to the CEO has more than doubled in a year, from 14% to 33%.

Farrell thinks this matters because the reporting line shapes the mandate. Under the CFO, procurement gets pulled towards a "slightly binary" brief: hit the savings number. Alongside the CEO, it can help define the business objectives in the first place — the build-or-buy calls, which supplier relationships to invest in, and where to take risk. His advice to procurement leaders is blunt: don't be the recipient of tasks from other people. The role, he argues, increasingly looks more like a chief operating officer's remit.

Farrell's closing advice zooms out beyond procurement, and comes from his army days: "march to the sound of the guns" — go where the action is. Right now, he says, that's procurement.

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