SAP NOW AI Tour: Andrew Daley on Training for AI

The SAP NOW AI Tour hosted a range of speakers exploring how AI can be used to increase operational efficiency and innovation.

At the London leg, experts discussed how AI is helping drive innovation, advancing sustainability and making an impact on worker and operational efficiency.

Supply Chain Digital had a word with Andrew Daley, Managing Director, Digital Procurement & Supply Chain at Edbury Daley, discussing why it is important to ensure training occurs before AI can be fully implemented. 

Tell us a bit about you and your role

I'm Andrew Daley, one of the founders of Edbury Daley. We're specialist recruiters in the world of digital procurement and supply chain, and I'm also the founder of a new business, Agentic Procurement, which is aimed at creating AI-ready procurement teams.

What does your day-to-day work involve?

We work with a lot of software vendors in the procurement world. We work with some of the consultancies that implement those solutions and we work with the end-user procurement teams to hire people who are typically focused on the implementation, adoption and use of digital tools.

All my conversations are with people who are hiring into roles in those organisations across the procurement ecosystem, or with people who are looking for new roles themselves or just some guidance on what their next career move might look like. I spend all my time on video screens chatting to people about careers, talent, skills, and hopefully connecting some great people with some great jobs along the way.

How big an issue is AI readiness as companies embark on large-scale AI implementation programmes?

I think it's a massive deal. We've launched an AI readiness survey on our new website, Agentic Procurement. From the early results, it's clear that people are just getting started on this journey. There's a lot of hype around AI and it's difficult for the non-technical mind to understand how it can be deployed. It's quite confusing at times. If you sit through three or four presentations, you might get three or four different flavours of what it might look like. So, there's a big education piece there for the leaders.

But for the people on the ground, the overwhelming concern is: is my job going to change or, dare I say it, get replaced? What does my future look like? There are all sorts of issues. There's a huge opportunity for procurement and for procurement professionals to evolve their capabilities and deliver more for their organisations. But in order to do that, they've got to take some personal responsibility for their own career development.

Where does that responsibility lie – with the individual, the employer or the solution provider?

That's a good question. Throughout my career you've seen big organisations attract great people with the promise of great training and development and investment in MBAs. But that does feel like it's gone out of fashion a little bit in recent years.

At the moment in this AI area, quite a few startups in the AI world are offering to educate the audience and train people on the use of the tool. But actually, I don't think that addresses the problem, because AI is really useful and easy to interact with – we can just talk to it normally. It's the other skills that need greater emphasis. For example, you free up time in your day job through the use of AI – what do you do with that time? All that strategic activity, critical thinking, all these other skills – that's where the investment needs to come. And I think at the moment, no one's quite sure how to get started on that.

Is there a genuine fear among procurement professionals that AI will replace their jobs?

It really is something that concerns people and it's one of the things which is actually a barrier to them experimenting with AI. We're generally scared of things we don't understand – that's a human trait, and I definitely see some of that with AI.

The elite functions that are forging ahead – I'd characterise their people as intellectually curious, creative, with a strong desire for personal development. They're out there doing it themselves, leading from the front and dragging their teams along with them. In the less progressive functions, there's fear and paralysis. The ones with the most fear are most vulnerable because they're not actually embracing the opportunity.

How important are events like SAP Now AI London?

Absolutely vital. I don't think there's any better environment, particularly for procurement professionals, to come out and learn about what's possible, see what different vendors are doing with their product roadmaps and talk to other people facing similar challenges. Get out there, network, learn – you'll really enhance your ability to take that back to your own organisation and share that learning.

Networking is vital and it’s a real pleasure to come and talk to so many different people across the ecosystem and learn, because it's all part of our credibility. How can we really effectively put great people into the right roles if we don't understand what they do?