TL;DR

• Over 75% of procurement executives believe agentic AI will deliver significant value — yet less than 50% feel confident they can monitor or control it.
• A 17-point awareness gap exists between leadership and their teams on agentic AI capabilities.
• This isn’t a technology problem — it’s a leadership readiness and change management gap.
• Leading CPOs are building hands-on experience through pilots rather than waiting for IT to deliver finished solutions.

Closing this gap requires personal experimentation, team training, and deploying only what you can supervise.

Here’s a number that should make every CPO uncomfortable: 49%.

That’s the percentage of procurement leaders who feel confident in their ability to monitor and control agentic AI technology. Not a majority. Not even half.

Now here’s the twist. According to The Hackett Group’s 2026 Agentic AI in Procurement Adoption Index, over 75% of these same leaders are confident about the potential value of AI capabilities. They see the opportunity. They believe in the outcomes. They just don’t trust themselves to manage it.

This isn’t skepticism about technology. It’s a crisis of confidence in organizational readiness.

The Belief-Control Paradox

Procurement has always been cautious about new technology — and rightfully so. Failed ERP implementations, half-deployed S2P suites, and shelfware have taught hard lessons. But agentic AI presents a different challenge.

Unlike traditional automation that follows predefined rules, agentic AI makes decisions. It negotiates. It prioritizes. It acts. And when something acts on your behalf, you need to trust it — or at minimum, understand how to supervise it.

The Hackett research reveals a striking pattern. While 77% of procurement leaders are confident about their own awareness of agentic AI capabilities, only 60% feel the same about their teams. That 17-point gap represents thousands of procurement professionals who are expected to work with technology their leaders aren’t sure they understand.

Procurement Confidence in Agentic AI: The Leadership-Team Gap

Source: The Hackett Group Agentic AI in Procurement Adoption Index – 2026

Why This Gap Matters More Than You Think

In change management, there’s a framework called ADKAR: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement. Most organizations fail at the first step.

If your team doesn’t understand what agentic AI is and how it applies to their work, they won’t want it. If they don’t want it, they won’t learn it. And if they don’t learn it, your million-dollar AI investment becomes expensive shelfware.

The awareness gap identified in this research isn’t just a training issue — it’s a strategic vulnerability. Organizations rushing to deploy agentic workflows while their teams remain uncertain are setting themselves up for resistance, workarounds, and ultimately, failure.

What Leading CPOs Are Doing Differently

The Hackett research highlights an interesting finding: some CPOs have built personal experience with agentic AI through pilots, training, and even hands-on development of workflows.

These leaders aren’t waiting for their IT teams to hand them a finished solution. They’re experimenting. They’re learning the terminology. They’re understanding firsthand what agents can and cannot do.

This hands-on approach accomplishes two things. First, it builds genuine confidence — not the false confidence that comes from vendor presentations, but the real understanding that comes from doing. Second, it signals to their teams that this technology matters enough for leadership to invest their own time. And once that confidence exists, leaders can make smarter decisions about whether to deploy point agents or orchestrated workflows ( Point Agents vs Agentic Workflows: What 65% of Procurement Leaders Are Choosing) — a choice 65% of procurement leaders are actively navigating.

Notably, Zycus — recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Source-to-Pay Suites — is embedding context-aware AI specifically designed for security and control, addressing exactly this confidence gap.

Closing the Gap: Three Starting Points

• Get hands-on before you mandate adoption. Run a pilot yourself. Understand what guardrails exist and what questions your team will ask.
• Bridge the 17-point awareness gap. Your teams need terminology training, use case examples, and clarity on how this changes their roles — not eliminates them.
• Build monitoring capabilities early. Don’t deploy what you can’t supervise. Start with constrained use cases where oversight is straightforward.

The belief in agentic AI’s value is already there. What’s missing is the organizational muscle to deploy it responsibly. And that muscle starts with leadership.

FAQs

Q1. What is agentic AI in procurement?
Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can autonomously execute tasks, make decisions, and take actions within defined parameters — rather than just providing recommendations. In procurement, this includes autonomous negotiations, intelligent intake routing, and self-managing workflows across source-to-pay processes.

Q2. Why do procurement leaders struggle to control agentic AI?
The challenge isn’t technical — it’s readiness. Most leaders lack hands-on experience with AI systems, their teams haven’t been trained on capabilities and limitations, and organizations haven’t established clear governance frameworks for autonomous decision-making.

Q3. How can CPOs build confidence in managing agentic AI?
Start with personal experimentation through pilots, invest in team-wide terminology and use case training, and deploy in constrained environments where monitoring is manageable before scaling to complex workflows.

Related Reads:

1. Why Agentic AI Is the Future of Source-to-Pay Automation by 2026
2. Solution: Merlin Agentic AI Platform
3. Pioneering Procurement: Building Your First Agentic AI Use Case
4. The Autonomous Advantage: How Agentic AI is Redefining Competitive Edge in Procurement
5. Agentic AI in Procurement: A Comic Book Exploration
6. Beyond GenAI: The Dawn of Agentic AI in Procurement