{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"BTW EP 27: Data or Delusion? Procurement\u2019s Future Runs on Truth","description":"Procurement doesn\u2019t have a data problem. It has a data delusion. For 25 years, the function has told itself the same story: if we can just clean up our spend, we\u2019ll finally be in control. And yet here we are\u2026 swimming in the same dashboards, drowning in fields, and still struggling to answer a simple question: what do we spend? In this episode of Buy: The Way\u2026To Purposeful Procurement, Jason Busch, founder of Spend Matters and now a self-described builder of AI \u201cco-workers,\u201d returns to the podcast to pressure-test BuyLaw #5: \u201cprioritize comprehensive, high-quality data.\u201d If procurement wants to operate in a world of AI employees, continuous validation, and P&L accountability, their data cannot remain partial, fragmented, or shaped by suppliers.  Jason draws a sharp distinction between the roles or entities that manage procurement data: copilots, agents, and what he calls digital co-workers (multi-agent infrastructures capable of executing complex work autonomously). But all that capability comes with a catch. When the marginal cost of activity drops toward zero, the absolute risk of bad data increases exponentially. Humans have the battle scars and the intuition to know when something isn\u2019t quite right with the data. AI doesn\u2019t, unless we explicitly teach it what \u2018right\u2019 looks like. That\u2019s where procurement\u2019s comfort with incomplete data becomes dangerous. For decades, the function has relied on narrow slices of information: negotiated price, historical spend, maybe a market index or two, but in an AI-enabled world, that\u2019s insufficient. Jason explains why context means everything \u2013 supplier financial health, commodity forecasts, tariffs, inventory signals, competitive pricing, risk data, contract performance signals, governance structures, and the cultural guardrails that determine how decisions are made. If procurement feeds incomplete, biased, or poorly governed data into increasingly autonomous systems, those systems won\u2019t just make mistakes faster; they\u2019ll actually end up institutionalizing them and making procurement\u2019s data problem unnecessarily worse. Jason\u2019s advice for procurement is pragmatic and urgent: set up a data governance committee tomorrow. Not to tidy historical spend, but to define what data matters, which sources are trustworthy, what tolerances exist for error, and at what point autonomous systems are allowed to act on that data. In a world of digital co-workers, incomplete data isn\u2019t a nuisance. It\u2019s a real, human liability. Links: Jason Busch on LinkedIn Rich Ham on LinkedIn Learn more at FineTuneUs.com   ","author_name":"Art of Procurement","author_url":"http:\/\/artofprocurement.com","html":"