Procurement was not in the room when the decision was made

By the time procurement is formally involved, the important decisions may have already been made. A business unit has identified its preferred supplier. A budget holder has committed to a solution in principle. A deadline has been set that makes competitive tendering feel impossible. Procurement arrives not as a strategic partner but as a process administrator, asked to legitimise a choice, rather than to inform it.

This pattern is neither accidental nor malicious. It is the predictable output of a procurement function that has been positioned as a compliance gate rather than a business enabler, reinforcing processes that are slow enough, complex enough, and frustrating enough that the rest of the organisation has learned to work around them. The result is not just poor value for money. It is audit exposure, competition failure, and a systematic waste of one of the most powerful commercial levers available to public sector organisations.

Late involvement is a structural problem

Gartner’s proactive procurement research is clear that late involvement is one of the most persistent and commercially costly challenges facing procurement functions globally across all sectors.. But in public sector contexts, the consequences are amplified and harder to reverse. Late procurement involvement means compressed timelines that preclude genuine competitive tendering. It means specifications written by technical teams without commercial input, inadvertently, or deliberately, producing requirements tailored to incumbent suppliers. It means emergency and single-source contract awards that accumulate quietly over time into a procurement portfolio with structural competition deficits.

The OECD’s 2025 review of member country implementation of its procurement recommendations found that the gap between strategic aspiration and procurement practice remains wide. Many member governments have set ambitious procurement objectives around sustainability, innovation, and SME participation that procurement functions cannot deliver if they are engaged only after policy and budget decisions have already been made. Strategy without early procurement involvement is aspiration without execution.

The Engagement Gap — When Procurement Is Involved vs. When It Should Be

Source: Gartner proactive procurement research; NAO commercial lifecycle guidance; OECD Public Procurement Recommendations

When the Business bypasses Procurement

The answer procurement functions least want to hear is usually the most honest one: because doing so is faster, easier, and feels lower risk. Procurement processes in many public sector organisations are characterised by long lead times, opaque requirements, and unpredictable timelines. A business unit with a deadline and a preferred solution will find ways around a function that appears to add delay without adding commercial value.

The NAO’s January 2025 report on the UK government’s approach to technology suppliers is unusually direct on this point. It found that departments are heavily reliant on a small number of suppliers, and that a persistent lack of skilled professionals equipped to manage complex digital contracts is leading to inefficiencies and escalating costs with the UK spending at least £14 billion annually on digital programmes and technology procurement. Late procurement involvement and limited commercial capability are not separate problems. They are different symptoms of the same underlying condition: a function that has been under-resourced and under-positioned for the commercial decisions it is supposed to lead.

Government has not aligned responsibilities, skills, and resources to lead digital procurement activities effectively. The persistent lack of skilled professionals equipped to manage the complexities of digital contracts is resulting in inefficiencies and escalating costs.

— National Audit Office — Government’s Approach to Technology Suppliers: Addressing the Challenges, January 2025

The Procurement Act as a structural prompt

The UK’s Procurement Act 2023 creates new obligations that implicitly require earlier procurement involvement. Transparency requirements around preliminary market engagement, obligations to publish procurement pipelines, and provisions around pre-market consultation all assume that procurement functions are involved before the commercial decision is made, not after. Organisations that continue to engage procurement only at the tender stage will find themselves unable to meet the Act’s requirements effectively and will accumulate both compliance and value-for-money risk accordingly.

This is the Act’s most significant practical implication for procurement functions. It is not merely a change to procurement procedures. It is a structural prompt, reinforced by legal obligation, to reposition procurement as a function that operates across the full commercial lifecycle, from needs identification through contract management, rather than one that activates only when a purchase order needs a signature.

Where Late Involvement Creates the Greatest Risk Exposure

Source: NAO commercial lifecycle guidance; OECD Procurement Recommendations; Gartner proactive procurement analysis

AI & Technology – A Grounded Perspective

What AI can do – and what it cannot do

AI as speed infrastructure — not strategic substitute

One of the primary drivers of late procurement involvement is speed: the rest of the organisation moves faster than the procurement process. If AI-assisted platforms can meaningfully compress the time from need identification to market analysis, specification drafting, and supplier engagement, then one of the main incentives for bypassing procurement is reduced. Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle for Procurement identified intake management, a unified, AI-powered entry point into procurement services, as the function’s most important emerging capability. The goal is to make engaging procurement as easy as working around it, so that the default becomes compliance rather than avoidance.

The Critical Limit

AI cannot reposition procurement as a strategic function. If leadership treats procurement as an administrative overhead, faster procurement processes will simply mean faster administration of decisions already made elsewhere. The strategic repositioning of the function, determining its involvement in planning and budget discussions, its involvement in policy design, are cultural and organisational changes that must be led by people, not enabled by platforms. AI gives a well-positioned procurement function the operational speed to sustain and justify its place. It cannot create that position in the first place.

The Path Forward

The public sector organisations moving furthest on this are those that have made procurement involvement a governance requirement rather than a discretionary step. Mandatory pre-market consultation for contracts above specified thresholds, published procurement pipelines, and cross-functional commercial governance structures all function as structural mechanisms that make earlier engagement the default rather than the exception. They work not because they make procurement more appealing, but because they make bypassing it harder and costlier.

The Open Contracting Partnership’s analysis of millions of contracts across multiple countries is unambiguous: transparent, early-engaged procurement consistently produces better outcomes, ensuring more competition, stronger accountability, and better value for money. The Procurement Act provides the legal foundation. The OECD’s principles provide the international framework. The evidence is not in dispute. What has historically been missing is the organisational will to act on it, combined with a function positioned, resourced, and equipped to deliver when the opportunity arises.

5 Recommendations for Procurement Leaders

1. Make procurement involvement a governance requirement, not a discretionary step.

The most effective organisations have stopped relying on goodwill and started using structure. Mandatory pre-market consultation for contracts above specified thresholds, cross-functional commercial governance boards, and published procurement pipelines all make earlier engagement the default. They work not because they make procurement more appealing, but because they make bypassing it harder.

2. Use regulatory obligations as the internal change argument.

Legislation, such as the UK Procurement Act 2023, requires pipeline publication preliminary market engagement and transparency obligations which assume procurement is involved before the commercial decision. If leadership asks why procurement needs to be involved earlier, the answer is now partly legal. Use that as it is a more durable argument than efficiency or value for money alone.

3. Diagnose why the business bypasses procurement in your organisation specifically.

The reasons vary: speed, perceived bureaucracy, lack of trust, or a belief that procurement adds no commercial value at early stages. Each requires a different response. Understanding the actual bypass behaviour in your organisation is the precondition for changing it. Talk to the business units that do it most, not just the ones that comply.

4. Invest in procurement speed before investing in procurement technology.

The most common reason procurement is bypassed is that it is slow. Before deploying AI-powered intake management or orchestration platforms, examine whether your current process times are genuinely competitive. If a business unit can get a supplier engagement started in two days by going around procurement, and your formal process takes three weeks, technology will not close that gap unless the process underneath it is also addressed.

5. Position AI as the enabler of speed — but only after the strategic positioning is secured.

AI-assisted intake, faster market analysis, and automated pre-qualification can all reduce the time cost of engaging procurement correctly. Gartner identifies intake management as the single most important emerging capability for procurement functions precisely because it removes the friction that causes avoidance. But that argument only lands if procurement is already positioned as a function worth engaging. Technology does not replace strategy, it follows it.

Key Takeaways

• Late procurement involvement is a structural problem, not a scheduling one. When procurement is engaged only after needs are defined, budgets committed, and preferred suppliers identified, it cannot deliver the competitive outcomes, value for money, or compliance assurance that legislation such as the UK Procurement Act 2023 legally requires.
• The NAO’s finding that the UK public sector lacks the skilled professionals to manage complex commercial relationships, particularly in digital and technology procurement, is the same problem viewed from a different angle. Under-resourced and under-positioned procurement functions get involved late because they are not trusted to add value early.
• The Procurement Act 2023 creates a structural prompt: pipeline publication obligations, pre-market consultation requirements, and preliminary market engagement provisions all assume procurement is in the room from the beginning. Organisations that do not adapt will accumulate compliance risk alongside commercial risk.
• AI has a specific and legitimate role as the infrastructure that makes engaging procurement faster, rather than bypassing it. AI-powered intake, rapid market analysis, and automated pre-qualification can close the speed gap that drives avoidance. But the technology only works for a procurement function that is already positioned to be worth engaging.
• The question every CPO in the public sector should be asking their leadership is straightforward: does this organisation treat procurement as a strategic function or an administrative one? The answer to that question determines whether AI investment creates value or simply automates the marginalisation of the function it was meant to support.