Why Digital Transformation (and AI Pilots) Fail: It’s Not the Tech, It’s the People

Today, the buzz isn’t just digital transformation - it’s AI pilots in procurement and supply chains. But here’s the truth: whether it’s algorithms or automation, it’s not the tech that fails. It’s us, the humans. 

AI Doesn’t Eliminate People Problems 

AI can: 

☑️ Summarise contracts in seconds 

☑️ Flag supplier risks before they bite 

☑️ Generate insights from mountains of data 

But AI can’t: 

☑️ Overcome organisational resistance 

☑️ Build trust across silos 

☑️ Inspire people to act differently 

That’s where leadership and culture come in. 

Why “Failing Fast” Matters 

AI pilots are different from old-school tech rollouts. They’re experiments, you try, you learn, you adjust. The danger is not failing, it’s not learning from failure. 

If a chatbot struggles with supplier queries, the lesson isn’t “AI doesn’t work.” It’s “our data needs cleaning, our prompts need refining, and our people need confidence to try again.” 

The organisations winning with AI aren’t the ones who get it right first time - they’re the ones who treat pilots as practice rounds, not perfection tests. 

Closing Thought: 

AI won’t replace procurement professionals, but professionals who learn to work with AI will replace those who don’t. 

Digital transformation doesn’t fail because of bad code or weak algorithms. It fails when we forget that transformation is, at its heart, a people project. 

And if we want AI to stick, we have to give ourselves, and our teams the freedom to try, fail, and try again. 💪 

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