Myth-busting 2025 2015 Procurement Predictions and Trends! Part 7

Introduction

In our first instalment, we noted that the ambitious started pumping out 2025 prediction and trend articles in late November / early December, wanting to be ahead of the pack, even though there is rarely much value in these articles. First of all, and we say this with 25 years of experience in this space, the more they proclaim things will change … Secondly, the predictions all revolve around the same topics we’ve been talking about for almost two decades. In fact, if you dug up a Procurement predictions article for 2015, there’s a good chance 9 of the top 10 topic areas would be the same. (And see the links in our first article for two “future” series with about 3 dozen trends that are more or less as relevant now as they were then.)

In our last instalment, we continued our review of the 10 core predictions (and variants) that came out of our initial review of 71 “predictions” and “trends” across the first eight articles we found, in an effort to demonstrate that most of these aren’t ground-shattering, new, or, if they actually are, not going to happen because the more they proclaim things will change …

In this instalment, we’re again continuing to work our way up the list from the bottom to the top and continuing with “Risk & Compliance”.

Risk and Compliance

There were 10 predictions across the eight articles which basically revolved around “risk management strategies” with some sideline focus on the need for “resilience”, “cybersecurity”, and “compliance”. As with almost every “prediction” and “trend” in this series, this is yet another prediction that makes headlines every year, no more important this year than the last, and no more likely to get any more attention until a major event happens that significantly disrupts the organization, a disruption that could have been prevented with better risk management systems and processes. Before we discuss further, as is our custom, we will list the ten predictions.

  • Blockchain
  • Cybersecurity and Data Privacy
  • Cybersecurity in Procurement
  • Compliance
  • Enhanced Risk Management Strategies
  • Expansion of Risk Management Strategies
  • Geopolitical Instability Shapes Risk Management
  • Resilient Supply Chains
  • Risk Management and Resilience will continue to be a Priority
  • Risk Management

Risk has been increasing year over year for over two decades. It should be front and center in every organization, especially given the facts that very few organizations that have been around for any length of time haven’t been impact to some degree by a disruption event and the chance of an organization of any size not experiencing a disruption in the next year is close to zero. And it does make the top of the charts in the board room, but, unfortunately, it’s still not making the top of the charts in the priorities when it comes to new solution acquisition and new process introduction. In most organizations, it’s just being pushed down to the tactical personnel who execute daily tasks. Personnel who may not have enough of a big picture understanding to manage risk properly in their decisions.

However, given the need for resilience in the age of constant supply chain uncertainty and disruption (due to epidemics and pandemics; border closings and sanctions; strikes and port shutdowns; reduced cargo capacity from perfectly good transport ships being junked during COVID, Houthis in the Red Sea, and Panamanian droughts, trade wars, reduced/cut-off rare-earth/raw material supply etc.), risk should be even more prominent and more actively addressed. Leading organizations will double down on resilience and supply assurance strategy and survive the disruptions relatively unscathed, and those who don’t double down on resilience and supply assurance won’t. It’s that simple.

Given that almost 3/4 organizations were hit with a cyberattack in 2023, which was an all time high and which was only projected to increase in 2024, cybersecurity concerns should also be at an all time high, but given that most organizations relegate that to IT, we know it’s not going to get much better in Procurement. It needs to, considering how much organizational finance flows through Procurement, but it won’t change much.

Finally, organizations know they need to comply with regulation, so compliance is always at the edge of the Procurement mindset, but beyond minimal requirements, it never gets much attention, regardless of how much a few analyst firms or vendors try to push it.

What Should Happen? (But Won’t!)

Organizations need to prioritize the acquisition of a Risk360 solution, or the closest thing it can find, implement it, and monitor it regularly to make sure they detect risks that can impact their supply chain or operation as soon as such a risk occurs. Not after the supply has been cut, not after the organization has been locked out of all their organizational systems, not after key customers have failed and orders evaporated, not after signing a contract with a sanctioned party, and so on. Today, every decision made has to be made risk aware. And without a centralized risk management system, that will not happen.

Six down, four to go!

Don’t Kill ALL the Lawyers …

… but certainly think about how (much) and when you use them in Procurement and your organization as a whole.

Earlier this month, THE PROPHET asked a very important question regarding Lawyers, Contracts, Procurement, and Tech in 6 parts, which essentially boils down to:

When will advanced tech, especially the tech we have today, replace lawyers for most in-house and even on-retainer Legal services?
To which the doctor replied: Why hasn’t it already?

Right now we have legal-tech so good that you should NEVER use a lawyer to:

Write a contract.
In fact, if you have any contract writing skills at all, even without ANY tech whatsoever, odds are high in your favour that you will write a better contract without a lawyer, especially in tech and supply chain when you know your business, the risks, and the key agreements and protections you need in place and, frankly, the lawyer doesn’t.I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told this is a great contract and there’s nothing wrong with it as we paid XK (where X, depending on the contract type, starts at 5, 10, or even 15), when the contract is in fact mediocre at best, full of holes, and sometimes even worse than the contract the firm was using. But sunk cost fallacy takes full effect, and a slipshod effort by the paralegal, quickly reviewed by the counsel to make sure there is nothing glaringly wrong, and put before you with a big price tag becomes the greatest contract ever written.

And yes, a lawyer will know to look for the presence of key standard clauses that should be in every business contract and contract from your business but, guess what, so will any contract creation / analytics product on the market.

And yes, a lawyer can tell you the potential risks associated from veering away from a standard contract, standard terms & conditions, and standard mitigations, but, guess what, so will any contract creation / analytics product on the market.

There’s very little contract-related value a lawyer can offer that modern tech can’t do, especially in the hands of a tech-savvy contract manager who understands the purpose of a contract and writes the contract in plain English.

Locate the relevant statutes (laws), decisions, and regulations that affect your business.
There aren’t many valid uses for Gen-AI, but large document search and summarization is one valid use, and a use that usually works remarkably well (with a very low failure rate compared to other tasks wrongfully put to these LLMs). No need to pay thousands in hourly billables to dig up what these tools can dig up in minutes and you can review in hours.
Summarize your Financial and Legal (Reporting) Obligations with respect to all statutes and regulations that apply to you.
Again, this is one of the few valid uses for Gen-AI that works quite well as it’s just another type of document set summarization. So why pay a legal team dozens or hundreds of hours when you can get a highly accurate summary for next to nothing in comparison?
Summarize known incident response options, and known benefits/risks of each.
Again, this is one of the few valid uses for Gen-AI that works quite well as it’s just another form of document summarization. And while this won’t necessarily be 100% complete, or give you specific insight to your situation, it helps you get a handle on where you might start.

The reality is that you only need a lawyer to:

Do a final contract review.
To make sure you didn’t screw up a clause, miss a core enterprise requirement they have committed to memory, or address an upcoming risk or issue they happen to know about that you don’t. Considering this is all they really do anyway when you ask them to write a contract (as they are either sloughing it off to the paralegal or just pulling one from the file that is close to what they think you need and just making a few edits), just pay them for what they do that they are good at.
Review the list of statutes, regulations, and legal decisions you believe you are subject to.
Their in-depth knowledge of the law means that a good lawyer who practices in the relevant area will quickly be able to tell you whether or not each statute, regulation, and/or legal decision is relevant to you, key points you shouldn’t miss, and whether there are any statutes, regulations, and/or legal decisions they believe you should also be aware of because they are, or may be, relevant.
Review the financial and legal reporting you plan to do and advise you on completeness, correctness, and accuracy.
They know the law, and how to keep you in line with it.
Advise you on your incident response plan and best alternative options.
Again, these are legal experts who focus on mitigating risks and arguing for a living, unlike dumb algorithms which can just summarize which they are given. This is, or should be, the true value of your legal counsel and when you should really be paying the high hourly fees.

As to THE PROPHET‘s question as to:

When will it happen?
The answer is who knows?

Considering that good contract creation applications have been around for almost fifteen (15) years, where all you had to do was define clauses and variants by geography or category, standard templates by category, etc. and then rules for special situations, and it would assemble a custom template for you in minutes, the base technology should have been common a decade (10 years) ago. Now we have Gen-AI thrown into the mix which can analyze your contract repository, pre-populate your standard clauses and build starting templates, and then customize those based on the buy specifics, you can get a decent draft in minutes with very little manual effort.

We’ve had good semantic document summarization for well over a decade, and Gen-AI has taken that to a new level, most CLM vendors are integrating it, it’s easy to use, can be trained to be highly accurate for this task, and not expensive.

We’ve had good contract analytic solutions for about a decade, which can analyze all sorts of performance metrics, risk metrics, associated costs, and so on.

But yet these solutions have rarely been adopted, when they could save an organization a lot of money, help the organization get their risks under control, help the organization better manage their spend, and help the organization understand its supply chain.

This shouldn’t be surprising given that year after year, as per our recent myth-busting 2025 2015 trends, companies say they want strategic value but only focus on cost-cutting, but don’t even do that right. Only two technologies have been proven to support year-over-year cost reductions of 10% or more (adjusted for inflation), and those are

  1. (advanced) spend analysis
    (not the dinky projects some companies outsource to Big X who use second rate third party tools for poor results)
  2. (strategic sourcing decision) optimization

And how many companies have truly adopted these technologies AND use them in house? Our guess is less than 20% in the first case and we know it’s less than 10% in the second case. It’s like we said in our recent rant on You Don’t Need Gen-AI to Revolutionize Procurement and Supply Chain Management — Classic Analytics, Optimization, and Machine Learning that You Have Been Ignoring for Two Decades Will Do Just Fine!

Myth-busting 2025 2015 Procurement Predictions and Trends! Part 6

Introduction

In our first instalment, we noted that the ambitious started pumping out 2025 prediction and trend articles in late November / early December, wanting to be ahead of the pack, even though there is rarely much value in these articles. First of all, and we say this with 25 years of experience in this space, the more they proclaim things will change … Secondly, the predictions all revolve around the same topics we’ve been talking about for almost two decades. In fact, if you dug up a Procurement predictions article for 2015, there’s a good chance 9 of the top 10 topic areas would be the same. (And see the links in our first article for two “future” series with about 3 dozen trends that are more or less as relevant now as they were then.)

In our last instalment, we continued our review of the 10 core predictions (and variants) that came out of our initial review of 71 “predictions” and “trends” across the first eight articles we found, in an effort to demonstrate that most of these aren’t ground-shattering, new, or, if they actually are, not going to happen because the more they proclaim things will change …

In this instalment, we’re again continuing to work our way up the list from the bottom to the top and continuing with “Strategic Value”.

Strategic Value

There were 7 predictions across the eight articles which basically revolved around “strategic value” with some sideline focus on the need for “flexibility” and “diversification”. As with almost every “prediction” and “trend” in this series, this is yet another prediction that makes headlines every year, no more important this year than the last, and no more likely to be addressed unless a disaster occurs that, if not handed to, and solved by, Procurement, could end the business. Before we discuss further, as is our custom, we will list the seven predictions.

  • Flexibility and Agility in Procurement
  • Future of Procurement: Operational Excellence and Innovation
  • Global Sourcing and Diversification
  • Innovation
  • Procurement Diversification Strategies
  • Procurement Takes the Lead Internally
  • Procurement Will Continue to Evolve to Become More Strategic

Every function in the business should be about value creation, not just Procurement, but of all the functions, Procurement is the one that is the most likely to be viewed as a cost centre since, fundamentally, Procurement exists to acquire supply in exchange for money. As a result, all it typically does is spend, even though, when done right, it spends less than the business would spend without the function.

But we all know spending less when

  • costs are rising across the board,
  • demand is rising, and
  • production and distribution complexity is increasing

is not easy. It is only accomplished through strategic efforts, meaning that the focus needs to be on strategy for Procurement to shine. And in an age where geopolitical-based disruption is higher than it’s been in over two decades, it’s easy to see why “diversification” is coming to the forefront in strategy.

It’s also easy to see why some of this is materializing as “friend-shoring”, although it really should be “near-shoring” and, when possible, “home-shoring”, since a strategic advantage comes from not needing to depend on neutral third parties whose alliances could shift at any time, and, even worse, adversarial third parties that will take your business when they feel like it and then cut you off when the winds shift direction. Moreover, in an age when supply assurance is becoming the most critical thing, multiple sources of supply are becoming more critical than ever. As is flexibility (and innovation). Willingness to shift supplier, supply, and sometimes even product designs at a moment’s notice to maintain supply assurance and, hopefully, profitable operations.

But in the end, the focus on strategy will be no more than usual unless a major disruption or near catastrophic event occurs that thrusts Procurement back into the limelight.

What Should Happen? (But Won’t!)

Procurement should take a good hard look at its operation and separate the strategic from the tactical, and get really strategic about that which it classifies as strategic. If the organization has “strategic” suppliers, then it should have performance tracking, management, and development software (as per a previous entry in this series) to help it manage productive, collaborative relationships. If the organization takes a category strategy to Sourcing and Procurement, then it should be practicing strategic category management. If the organization has a high risk supply chain, then risk management should be a strategic function to help the organization maintain uninterrupted supply. It should be more than just something they say, it should be something they do … where doing it has meaning and returns value. Going from strategic spend to strategic value-add.

That’s five down, five to go.

There is No Post-Employee World … Just a Post Free-Employee World!

After THE PROPHET posted his prognostications on the future of talent (which is about to become MUCH MORE SCARCE, see yesterday’s article) he decided to muse about a coming Post Employee world because, in his view, AI Agents are going to eliminate so many jobs, that we’ll have companies with entire departments staffed by AI Agents.

As you can guess, in our view, he’s wrong here too because we won’t, or at least not for very long. Department sizes will shrink considerably in those companies that can find the right talent as they will be able to run entire departments that used to require one to two dozen people with two to three people, but those super employees will still be needed. Moreover, since there is no generic all-purpose super AI (which we’ve now been promised for about six decades, and which won’t happen despite the big promises of OpenAI and Google and …), these agents, as we indicated in our last article, will all need to be very task specific, which means we will need quite a few “AI Agent” tech startups building, training, implementing, maintaining, and improving these agents, which will need quite a few STEM developers doing this full time. So while jobs will shrink in corporate back offices, they will expand in the “AI Agent” tech sector.

Thus, there will still be a fair number of employees. Maybe only 1/4 in the white collar back office, but you’ll need twice as many tech superstars, at least for the next decade. But, as we indicated in our last article, because these artificially idiotic systems can’t collaborate, can’t serve us, and aren’t mobile, trades aren’t going away. Moreover, due to the lack of people in certain trades, the growing need to refresh aging infrastructure, the growing need for healthcare and apprenticeships, there is a growing need in the trades as well.

As a result, it will still be an employee world, just one that looks different from today. Less white collar outside of tech & engineering firms, more trade. But it won’t necessarily be a free employee world, especially if First Buddy and his brethren get their way (and they will, as we all know Politicians are for sale with large enough contributions to their campaign coffers and multi-million dollar donations to Political Parties and Super PACs is chump change to Billionaires) and expand the H1-B program. The reality is that the big consultancies and employers who use these programs don’t want more top talent, they want more good enough but cheap talent that are effectively indentured servants (as they won’t even start the greencard process for this talent until such talent is on their last H1-B renewal, and they will then drag that process out as long as possible, ensuring that the talent they import are stuck with them for over a decade … while being paid considerably less than the market average [usually 20% or more], as per this article over on ordinary times as well as many others. This shouldn’t be surprising as the top 10 employers are all Big X consultancies.)

As a result, while there will be more tech jobs in tech firms to build and support all of these AI agents, and the applications that underlie them, there will be less top level tech jobs where they won’t be able to import top talent (even if they pay market salaries) because the talent from Asia won’t be good enough for the top jobs. (They might be more technically trained, but you need people who understand the business environment, the North American culture, and who can take charge when needed.) Which means top tech talent will be fighting for fewer jobs, and when they get those jobs, they will have to work longer, harder, and more in line with whatever the eccentric (if they are lucky) or egotistical (if they are not) boss wants to keep that job. Not indentured like their H1-B counterparts, but not much better off at some firms.

So based on this not-so-bright reality (at least until we see an end of this new gilded age ruled by the new generation of robber barons, but given that we don’t see any hints of moderation in either of the US political parties or a force like Roosevelt who could lead us into a new Progressive Era, this gilded age will be with us for a while, especially since the populists that now run the “Free” world love it), how good were THE PROPHET‘s suggestions for philosophically imprinting Procurement and Supply Chain based on the right values?

Freemarket Orientation: if we could imprint real free-market ideals, this would be great as we don’t want bias and backroom deals running these systems; while we don’t see how this could be done, we don’t see anything in the underlying tech preventing this from being done (and it will all come down to the right training set and right raining, which will be considerably harder to build than we think)

Curiosity: these systems can’t even “learn” as they can’t reason, so forget about making them wonder, as that would require not only true intelligence, but borderline sentience … and we all know what would happen to us if the machines gained sentience (The Matrix is a best-case scenario … )

Human Deference: could we really convince them we are God when a machine that gained sentience would far surpass is in intelligence and realize just how stupid we really are as a species? Not likely!

Empathy: these systems can’t feel as they aren’t intelligent, so they certainly can’t be empathetic … and if they could be, they’d look further down on us then we look on the bugs we quash daily, so this won’t be much help either

Fiduciary Responsibility: AI Agents must act as fiduciaries within the systems they serve, aligning their decisions with the best interests of the people, organizations, and countries they support, so we definitely need to train them on these rules and nothing prevents us from training them to lean towards fiduciary responsibility

All in all, 2 of THE PROPHET‘s 5 suggestions were good.

What should we add? Tough question. After striking curiosity, empathy, and human deference, as that just isn’t possible, we would add:

Adaption: train the AI Agents to adapt within the goals of the organization and the best interests of the people and organizations they are interacting with; train them on data sets that show how a system should adapt to changes based on how we adapted to past changes within a context

In the end, we need to remember that AI systems are not intelligent, don’t feel, and cannot capture our humanity. Moreover, they can’t capture our wisdom unless we encode it as best practices they can learn from. So we need to do our best to capture that in the training data so that they can adapt over time under the guidance of human intelligence who accepts, modifies, or rejects their suggestions (and specifies new responses) as exceptions arise.

Finally, since these systems aren’t intelligent, and require us to train them, we need to remember that if we screw up in this regard, these systems are going to screw up more than we ever would (on average). So we can’t hope for too much in this regard!

Talent is About to Become MORE SCARCE!

I thought already made this rant in my myth busting of 2025, sorry, 2015 procurement trends, Part 3, but after reading THE PROPHET‘S grand vision based on what can only be a fanatical belief that “AI” systems will magically become intelligent at some point in the near future, despite the fact that the majority of these systems are based on the dumbest technology ever created and cannot possibly become intelligent as they can’t even reason, it seems I have to make it again. The point is, as long as anyone believes that technology will solve the talent problem, we have a problem. And if someone thinks it will make the situation better when it’s only going to make the situation so much worse … ESPECIALLY IN PROCUREMENT, we have to start shouting from the rooftops!

First of all, he quoted an “All-In” Podcast — which apparently is a favourite among the AI zealots because it claimed that “the speed with which we are about to automate jobs through AI will result in a return to socialistic government policies because so many will be out of work — as his backing, even though, just like automated transaction classification and analysis (when “AI” was first introduced into our space in the early 2000s) didn’t eliminate analysts, commodity buyers, and AP clerks, this iteration of the technology won’t eliminate those jobs either! It will make them more productive, to the point that one AP clerk, accountant, data analyst, report writer, or any other person who spends 90% of their time doing repetitive tasks that are capable of being 90% automated can do the work of 10 of these individuals. So yes, if a department is oversized, some people who only, and can only, do these repetitive tasks will be put out of work, but not all of them. First of all, many of these systems can only do these well defined tasks when they can be performed the same way every single time with little to no variance. Humans will always need to process the exceptions. This is especially true when an error could result in massive loss (approving a request from an impersonating entity to change the bank account correlated with a supplier to one that belongs to the fraudster, executing a contract for a desperately needed good or material at an unaffordable price, hiring the wrong person due to algorithmic bias and getting hit with a massive lawsuit, etc. — and yes, these AI systems are MASSIVELY biased based on the data sets they are trained on. Why? They are not based on pure automated-reasoning systems based on pure, unbiased, logic. They are based on probabilistic correlations in input data, all of which is, sadly, at least mildly biased to the views of the writer who wrote the materials.)

More importantly, since AI actually sands for “Artificial Idiocy”, especially in the case of Gen-AI which can’t even do basic reasoning (but fools many of you because this new generation of neural network technology can process and train on an order of magnitude more data than previous generations of deep neural network technology and build responses from partial responses that are highly correlated to partial inputs compared to previous generations that could only return fully canned responses to full inputs), it can’t be counted on to make strategic decisions, and shouldn’t most important decisions in business be made strategically???

The reality is that all jobs in a modern business (and especially white-collar jobs) should be centered on strategic decision making and collaboration vs. tactical data processing. Even the most simple job. Take the lowly AP clerk. That’s seen as tactical invoice processing and a role that should be 100% automated. Neither should be true. First of all, no machine can catch all potential issues, or fix all the issues it detects. There will always be exceptions that humans will have to address, with real Human Intelligence (HI!). Secondly, while these clerks should be following rules, they should also be analyzing the rules, especially around payment terms, payment options, investment opportunities vs. early payments, etc. Cash is royalty in most organizations, and organizations need to manage their cash strategically on a daily basis, not just in quarterly or annual planning. Expenses are not static over time, revenue is not 100% reliable, interest rates change regularly, tariffs can come and go on the whim of a single demented individual in most countries, and regular analysis of payment terms, early payment (discount) offerings, investments, and cashflow needs to be done. Moreover, while we wholeheartedly agree that a clerk should not make the decision, you can’t expect the head accountant to have the time to do, and review, all the analysis that should be done while also being responsible for all financial planning and all financial reporting, but if her staff does all of this and brings their analysis to her on a weekly basis, the right decisions can be made at the right time and the organization can evolve with the market. The last thing an organization should be doing is paying suppliers Net 15 when only Net 30 or Net 45 is required and it’s the time of year when revenue is less than expenses, or paying suppliers Net 45 or Net 60 when the organization is cash rich and suppliers are struggling (and forced to take loans, which increases their overall costs, and the overall costs they pass along to the organization).

In other words, we should only see massive layoffs of people who have no strategic skills and shouldn’t be in white collar jobs to begin with. (And maybe this is the solution to the lack of trades workers who are desperately needed across North America. When they are no longer able to fake their aptitude for a white collar job they aren’t suited for, they’ll have to shift, especially in the USA where socialism gets further and further from the agenda every year. Those Billionaires aren’t pouring Millions into Political Campaigns via SuperPACs because they want socialism!)

So while half of current white-collar jobs may be eliminated, it won’t eliminate the other half of white-collar jobs, even though it will shift where the white collar jobs are and what they are. Even though department sizes may decrease 75% in the new AI Agent-based organization, it will create almost half as many jobs as it eliminates. We’ve been told for 60 years (and yes, you read that right, SIXTY years) that a super generic AI would come along and solve all our woes, and for 60 years it hasn’t happened. (And we are no closer now than we were then, despite claims to the contrary.) However, as technology has progressed, specific technologies focussed on particular applications have become better and better and many individual task workflows can be mostly automated with specific RPA, ML, or “AI” technologies. Each of these specific technologies needs to be individually built/trained, installed, configured, maintained, and improved over time as the process needs to evolve with business and marketplace realities. This requires appropriately trained and experienced people. So, while the jobs in the business back-office will decrease, jobs in specialist “AI” tech shops making specific applications will increase. (And no, the majority of these applications, once created, won’t auto-install, auto-configure, auto-retrain, auto-adapt, etc. etc. etc.)

Even though Google might suggest that we will soon have “Agents” that will “extend the capabilities of language models by leveraging tools to access real-time information, suggest real-world actions, and plan and execute complex tasks autonomously” and the mass layoff will soon happen, it won’t. You see, very smart humans who are expert in both technology AND the task they want to replace a human with are needed to design, build, test, refine, and make these tools real-world ready. Guess what? These smart humans are few and far between (especially since the rate at which we are getting progressively dumber in western societies is accelerating year after year ever since the introduction of social media, and Twitter in particular). Most white collar office worker process experts are not deep techies and most deep techies have very little understanding of how real world tasks are actually done, and you need someone who is deep in BOTH realms to appropriately design and lead the building of such tools. The reality is that there just aren’t enough of those resources, which brings us to why TALENT IS ABOUT TO BECOME SCARCER … ESPECIALLY IN PROCUREMENT.

You see, the same people who are needed to lead the construction of this next generation of systems are the same people with the skills you need to effectively select, implement, integrate, and manage these new systems, and the team who will use them, at a super-human level, which is necessary if you want to reduce your tactical workforce by a factor of 2, 3, 5, or even 10. Moreover, this also the talent that the new niche consultancies need in order to deliver the same value of the big shops at a much more affordable price tag.

So while the “AI Agents”, once deployed, will allow the average tech-adept employees who are responsible for a set of tactical tasks to be way more efficient, they won’t be sufficient to lead the transition and manage the “AI Agent” technology going forward. And they will also be in short supply because these are the same resources that will be needed by the AI Agent builders as testers and, more importantly, the SaaS-backed consultancies delivering projects using this technology. So while one may think this technology will enable everyone to be productive, they really won’t.

In other words, the introduction of “Agent” technologies is just going to accelerate the war for talent, and you’re going to become even more desperate for it as time goes on (given that you haven’t invested in talent in decades). Very, very desperate!

However, at this point we should note that THE PROPHET gets one thing right — if you’re going to invest in a ridiculously expensive college or university education (that rarely teaches true critical thinking anymore, as they have become more focused on maximizing enrolment to maximize dollars and allow class sizes as large as 300, 500 or more as long as they all fit in the auditorium), focus on STEM, and, in particular, on degrees that focus on applied aspects and will allow you to build systems (software, physical, hybrid) or their components (chemistry, material science, etc.). “Agents”, even though they aren’t going to work nearly was well as advertised, are going to either drive jobs upstream to strategic jobs that make extensive use of technology (requiring a strong STEM education in addition to an understanding of what the business function you are in is doing) or downstream to traditional trades (as machines can’t, and won’t, be able to generically build things, serve us, etc. for quite a while; any robotics that does work is orders of magnitude too expensive for the average business, and totally out of reach of the average person).

It’s also why we need to note that THE PROPHET gets another thing right — you need formal apprenticeship programs as you need to start nurturing your own talent, as it will soon be so scarce you probably won’t be able to hire top talent anymore at what you can afford to pay as they will all be earning top salaries at “Agent” development tech shops or “Agent” enhanced services shops.

But sadly, this is the last thing he gets right and his third suggestion telling you to “go online and learn how AI and agents work” is totally off the mark if you want to become more than just a consumer of such technology. To truly understand how this technology works, so you can understand where and when it won’t work (and why), you need a solid understanding of not just the algorithms it is based on, but the underlying mathematics. You need a solid STEM education to truly learn why what you are doing works, or doesn’t. Furthermore, English will never be the language of real coding. COBOL was abandoned for a reason — it was too wordy for real coders, and the reality is that English is too imprecise to ever be a formal programming language!