How AI Is Shaping the Future of Procurement in France

Amid economic uncertainty and heightened sustainability expectations, French procurement leaders face an evolving landscape.

A survey of 100 senior decision makers in procurement with responsibility over supply chains in France, conducted by SAP Taulia in August 2025, paints a picture of a profession ready to invest in the right tools, capabilities, and leadership support to build resilient artificial intelligence (AI)-driven strategies.

Supporting sustainability goals

While procurement in France is still closely associated with core financial responsibilities, professional leaders expect their future influence to extend beyond this into risk foresight and intelligent planning.

At present, the biggest impact for leaders on business outcomes lies in optimizing cash flow and reducing financial risk (38%), alongside shaping supply chain strategy to support long-term business growth (also 38%).

However, looking ahead, the proportion who believe their biggest future impact will be supporting sustainability and corporate responsibility goals stands at 38%, compared to just 24% today. Likewise, one in three (33%) expect to drive innovation through deep collaboration with suppliers, compared to 26% today.

The message appears to be clear: procurement’s role in France is becoming more strategic and innovation-driven.

It also highlights a contrast between France and its closest neighbour, the UK. While France expects procurement’s impact to grow most in sustainability and innovation, the UK sees a larger rise in risk-management responsibilities.

Challenges getting stronger but leadership priorities lagging

A complex environment means that there are some barriers to progress, but encouragingly there is widespread perception that artificial intelligence (AI) can help solve many of the challenges French professionals face.

Nearly three quarters (73%) of respondents say that procurement challenges have increased over the past year, with almost one in five (18%) seeing a significant rise. Over one in three (34%) cite navigating geopolitical risks as the biggest issue, while balancing internal and supplier priorities, managing macroeconomic shifts, and ensuring supply continuity while achieving best value each concern 31% of respondents.

This points to the growing need for better tools and decision-making support, which is where AI represents a major opportunity; consequently, most procurement professionals in France (81%) believe that AI could have a major or moderate impact on addressing their challenges, with 37% expecting a major impact.

However, leadership teams are not yet fully aligned. When asked where their organizations are focusing AI investment as a priority, procurement and supply chain management sat in a distant fourth place at 36% behind three other sectors.

This apparent disconnect seems to signal a gap between procurement’s needs and organizational investment focus, not least because the overwhelming majority (91%) of procurement professionals say it is important for leadership to act to help them overcome current challenges, 63% of which call it very important.

AI adoption on the rise

While AI is already gaining traction in France, adoption is uneven across tool types. Almost half (45%) of those surveyed currently use AI-powered procurement tools while 57% already use generative AI (GenAI) tools.

In fact, GenAI is being used significantly more often than procurement-specific AI tools for strategic tasks such as contract management and compliance tracking (32% vs. 20% respectively) and developing procurement strategy or business cases (30% vs 18%).

This points to a perception that while purpose-built AI is useful to automate operational efficiencies, GenAI is being used to shape strategic procurement activities.

The benefits for strategic capability

For the majority who already use some form of AI, there are clear benefits in three key areas:

• Operational efficiency – saving time and money, boosting productivity and reducing repetitive tasks
• Compliance and risk – enhancing contract analysis and negotiation
• Predictive capability – better demand forecasting/spend analysis and enabling more proactive decision-making.

There are some grey areas of concern – almost twice as many French respondents than UK (48% v 25%) had job cut fears, while just over two in five (42%) thought AI could reduce the procurement function’s overall importance.

Nonetheless, the tide is turning. Almost nine in ten (87%) rate their organization’s data quality as good when considering AI’s full potential, with a clear majority agreeing that advanced analytics in procurement is helping the function move from reactive to proactive (78%), shifting from manual processes to strategic, value-adding work (85%).

Looking to the future: humans and AI in harmony

One of the key takeaways was the message that balancing AI and human leadership is crucial. While French procurement professionals see AI delivering the most impact in invoice automation (35%), spend analysis and cost-saving identification (32%), and procurement strategy development (30%), they are selective about the areas in which AI should lead.

For instance, they are comfortable with AI being central to timesaving, automated tasks such as contract drafting and review (43%) and spend analysis or reporting (40%).

However, when it comes to navigating real-world compromises, they strongly prefer human leadership when it comes to supplier negotiations – 44% want humans to lead direct negotiations compared to 31% for AI.

Perhaps this points to the future of AI in procurement in France taking on a hybrid role. One in which organizations harness the power of AI to accelerate insight, efficiency and compliance, while human expertise is the engine behind the relationships, operational resilience and decision-making that drives long-term supply chain value.