Everyone's Cutting Heads Before the AI Even Works with Conrad Bedard

Conrad Bedard has rebuilt the procurement function from scratch at 5 companies across banking, insurance, and telecom. He's sat on both sides of the table, buying the technology and governing the risk, and he sees enterprises making the same mistake with AI that manufacturing made with robotics 20 years ago: cutting capacity before the tool can absorb it. In this conversation, Conrad and Nick get into why source-to-pay transformations took almost two years to get approved (and why that was the point), what goes wrong when companies bolt new technology onto broken processes, and why it's almost never procurement that kills an AI deal. They dig into the maturity-jump problem, organizations trying to leap from level 2 to level 5 in one move, and where a regulated buyer should actually start. Essential listening for procurement leaders, CFOs, and anyone in a regulated industry being told to "do more with less" with AI. Conrad's LinkedIn   / conrad-bedard   Takeaways Procurement plays a crucial role in providing total value to the business, beyond cost savings and contract administration. Implementing AI in procurement requires a focus on data quality, process remodeling, and change management. Chapters 00:00 — Intro: 16 years in procurement, buy side and sell side 00:56 — Walking into orgs that treat procurement as a cost center 01:23 — What the first 90 days actually look like 03:40 — Falling into procurement by accident 07:13 — Assessing the lay of the land in a new organization 09:55 — The #1 implementation failure: new tech on old processes 11:32 — "Dirty data in is dirty data out" 13:51 — Why approval took almost two years (and why that mattered) 16:47 — The robotics parallel: buying the shiny thing too early 18:56 — Why governance has to make AI defendable and defensible 20:10 — Why procurement rarely says no, but risk and IT do 21:44 — The maturity-jump problem: level 2 to 5 in one leap 22:20 — Will AI replace junior and mid-level roles? 22:56 — Evolving roles vs. eliminating them 25:36 — Where to actually start: process, intake, low-risk tasks 25:52 — Start small, then go complex