Tom Mills, Head of Procurement at Bibby Financial Services, shares his predictions for procurement priorities in 2025.

In the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, procurement teams have found themselves increasingly at the centre of businesses’ efforts to tackle an environment of accelerating trends, more frequent disruptions, and changing consumer behaviours. Procurement has risen to these challenges by embracing new technologies (procurement is one of the leading areas where generative AI promises to have something approaching a genuine application) and developing new strategies. 

CPOs’ priorities have shifted from more traditional cost-containment goals towards more strategic objectives like resilience and sustainability. However, keeping spend low and creating savings is still at the heart of the function. Holding onto procurement’s core goal of cost containment while meeting new challenges and opening new avenues for value creation will see CPOs prioritise new goals in the year ahead, according to Tom Mills, Head of Procurement at Bibby Financial Services. We sat down with him to explore the four priorities defining procurement’s approach to the year ahead.

Supply chain resilience

2025 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for AI and procurement technology. Businesses and procurement leaders face increased pressure to tackle ongoing global instability and overcome supply chain disruptions that are constantly evolving. 

Now more than ever, it is crucial that procurement teams are aware of global political and economic conditions. A strong supply chain is essential for any business’ success, and understanding how geopolitical issues affect the supply of products will help businesses stay on the front foot of any emerging risks or challenges. Supply chain resilience will continue to be at the forefront of conversations in 2025 and being informed of the global landscape is the first step to building this resilience. 

AI as a resource

Building on the momentum of 2024, we will also see how AI can be a transformative tool for enhancing product and service availability and making supply chains more resilient than ever. Companies will be looking for ways to integrate AI with their current technology, and optimise their procurement strategy. 

It will be interesting to see how widely teams adopt these innovations and how they leverage them for efficiency. With AI automating many manual tasks, we will see the focus shift towards restructuring the capabilities of procurement teams to ensure that they deliver the most value to their business.  With the support of AI, strategic procurement teams can focus on high impact activity, rather than being bogged down in the details and limited by slow and lengthy processes. 

AI for efficiency

The evolving role of technology in procurement will enable teams to focus their efforts on larger investments where they can create the most value. For example, we will see more procurement teams establish a self-service framework that includes useful tools and templates and provides a list of preferred vendors that’s easily accessible for employees. Providing freedom within a framework will empower teams to buy with confidence.

In this way, AI has the potential to help procurement teams overcome the challenge of demonstrating the strategic importance of procurement, not just as a buying function, but as a tech savvy engine that drives growth across the business. 

In 2025, humans will interact more with AI, meaning that emotional intelligence will become a key differentiator in the market. Procurement leaders will need to think about how they can tap into the skills of their team such as sharp decision making, leadership and collaboration as these will be more important than ever.

Talent shortages

There is also a pressing need to tackle the talent shortage in procurement. Many young professionals are still hesitant to enter the field so businesses must work on attracting fresh talent in order to succeed. Looking ahead, businesses should consider what matters to Gen Z in order to attract new talent. 

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