Share with your COO
Zycus is betting that procurement’s AI moment has arrived, and that the function’s leadership needs to own it rather than outsource the strategy to IT. The company’s Agentic AI Procurement Summit 2026 drew 1,500 senior procurement leaders from 50-plus countries, and released two research reports alongside live demos of its Merlin platform. The headline number from The Hackett Group’s survey of 250-plus CPOs is uncomfortable: fewer than half feel confident they can monitor and control agentic AI they’ve already deployed.
What this means for your business
The 58% of procurement leaders expecting material agentic AI impact within twelve months is a useful pressure test. If your procurement function is in that majority but still running pilots rather than production deployments, the gap isn’t a technology problem, it’s a governance one. The Forrester report’s core argument, that CPOs must own AI strategy rather than delegate it upward to IT or outward to vendors, cuts directly at the operating model question most COOs are quietly deferring. Who actually holds accountability when an autonomous negotiation agent (software that conducts supplier negotiations with limited human input) agrees to terms your legal team wouldn’t have approved?
The confidence finding from Hackett deserves more weight than it typically gets in vendor-hosted research. Fewer than half of CPOs feeling in control of technology they’ve presumably chosen and deployed is a procurement-scale version of shadow IT risk, where the system is sanctioned but the oversight infrastructure hasn’t caught up. Zycus, selling into this exact anxiety with a governed agentic platform, has an obvious interest in amplifying the fear, but the pattern it describes is real. Organizations routinely authorize AI tooling before building the monitoring layer, then discover the gap only when something goes wrong at contract value.
The falsification condition for the “CPO must own AI strategy” thesis is straightforward. If AI procurement tools keep getting bought, configured, and governed by IT, and procurement outcomes improve anyway, Forrester’s governance argument collapses into turf preference. Watch whether CPO-owned deployments in the Hackett index outperform IT-led ones on cycle time and compliance metrics in the 2027 edition. That data, not vendor-hosted confidence scores, is what makes the ownership question a structural claim rather than a positioning move.
Based on reporting from Zycus Concludes Agentic AI Procurement Summit 2026; Forrester and Hackett Group Research Released, originally published 2026-06-24 19:23:00.
