By Sheldon Mydat, Founder and CEO, Suppeco. 

 

For about a decade I’ve been making the same unfashionable argument to anyone who’d sit still: companies don’t lose money at the negotiating table. They lose it afterwards, quietly, in the long grey stretch between signing a contract and actually having to live with it. In 2025 the industry finally caught up. Then it brought entirely the wrong tool to the job.

 

Look at what the analysts are saying out loud now. Gartner reckons cost reduction will fall from 52% of procurement’s value in 2025 to 29% by 2030. Read that twice. The one thing procurement has measured itself by for thirty years is about to become a minority of what it’s actually for. Deloitte has put a figure on the leak: up to 30% of contracted value lost every year to poor supplier management. Ivalua, nobody’s idea of a radical, now writes openly about the “growing disconnect between procurement’s ambition to transform and its ability to execute.” Even the buyers’ guides have started saying the quiet part. Kodiak’s 2026 edition warns that if a renewal is a surprise, the value has already gone, and if the system makes collaboration awkward, people just drift back to email.

 

So the symptom finally has a name. The money goes after the handshake. Good. Now watch what everyone’s decided to do about it. Buy agents.

 

The cure that treats the wrong organ

 

Gartner’s headline for 2026 is that supply chain software with agentic AI grows from under $2bn today to $53bn by 2030, and that 90% of B2B buying will be agent-intermediated by 2028, pushing something like $15 trillion through machine-to-machine exchanges. I’m not here to sneer at that. Suppeco is an AI company. SuppEQ runs on it. Used well, an agent that watches a relationship around the clock and flags the drift no human had time to catch is genuinely useful, and I’ll defend that all day.

 

But here’s the bit nobody wants to print. An autonomous agent pointed at a broken measure doesn’t close the leak. It widens it, faster. Goodhart’s Law doesn’t switch itself off because you’ve automated the scorecard. It gets worse, because the thing gaming the metric now never sleeps, never gets bored, and never has the human instinct to stop and think “hang on, this number’s climbing but the relationship’s going to hell.” We are about to industrialise the exact failure that created the problem and file it under transformation. The leak was never a workflow problem. That’s the misdiagnosis sitting underneath the whole spending spree.

 

What’s actually bleeding

 

Call it Dynamic Margin Erosion. A contract is a photograph: prices, terms, assumptions, all true on the day everyone signed. The business it’s meant to govern is a film. Demand moves, scope creeps, the spec quietly mutates, and the ground shifts under the tariffs that CIPS now describes as a permanent condition rather than a shock. The agreement stands still while reality keeps walking. The space that opens between the two is where margin goes to die: a few points at a time, too slowly for anyone to call it a crisis, too steadily for anyone to honestly ignore.

 

You can’t automate your way out of that with execution software, because the gap isn’t an execution failure. It’s a relationship failure. The drift gets caught, when it gets caught at all, by the account manager who mentions something in passing, by the category lead who notices the tone has cooled, by the person who treats a supplier like a customer worth keeping rather than a line item to squeeze. Relationship capital is an asset, and like every asset it depreciates the second you stop maintaining it. Most organisations are running theirs to failure and booking the write-off as savings.

 

Where the machine earns its keep

 

This is where I fall out with both camps. The AI maximalists think the agent is the relationship. The purists think any software poisons it. Both are wrong, and my late father, who spent his working life in the motor trade on nothing but trust and a long memory, would have laughed at the pair of them.

 

The relationship is human. It always was. What the machine does, done properly, is hand the humans their attention back. It watches the thousand small signals no team has ever had the headcount to watch, and it tells you where the erosion is starting while you can still pick up the phone. It surfaces the drift. It does not own the judgement about what to do once the drift is on the table. That part is still yours, and thank god for it.

 

CIPS’s 2026 survey is quietly telling on this point. Asked which skills they most want to build, practitioners put relationship management in their top five, sitting level with the AI everyone’s losing sleep over. The people doing the actual work already know where this lands. The discipline is daily. The relationship is the product. The agent is a very good smoke alarm and a very poor substitute for caring whether the house burns down.

 

So buy the agents. They’re coming whether you sign the order or not. Just point them at the right disease. Use them to see the erosion, not to automate the indifference that caused it. Get that wrong and 2026 ends with a generation of beautifully orchestrated supply bases, leaking margin at machine speed, with nobody left in the room who remembers it was ever about a relationship.

 

About the Author

Sheldon Mydat is the Founder & CEO of Suppeco (suppeco.com), an AI powered Supplier Relationship Management platform recognised by IDC as a 2023 Named Innovator. Sheldon is also a 25 year practitioner having led supplier transformation programmes across defence, financial services, logistics, and public sector.

 

Sources
Procurement’s value shifting away from cost (52% in 2025 to 29% by 2030). — Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Agentic AI in Supply Chain Management Software, 2026, as summarised in Opstream’s analysis.
https://www.opstream.ai/blog/agentic-procurement-orchestration-53-billion-shift/
Up to 30% of potential value lost annually to poor supplier management. — Deloitte, cited in Spendflo, “What Is Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)?”
https://www.spendflo.com/blog/supplier-relationship-management
“Growing disconnect between procurement’s ambition to transform and its ability to execute.” — Ivalua, “The Ultimate 2026 Guide to Supplier Relationship Management.”
https://www.ivalua.com/blog/supplier-relationship-management/
Renewal surprises and collaboration friction as value-leak signals. — Kodiak Hub, “The 2026 SRM Software Buyer’s Guide.”
https://www.kodiakhub.com/blog/srm-software-buyers-guide
Agentic SCM software growing from under $2bn (2025) to $53bn by 2030; 60% enterprise adoption by 2030. — Gartner press release, 7 April 2026.
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-04-07-gartner-forecasts-supply-chain-management-software-with-agentic-ai-will-grow-to-53-billion-in-spend-by-2030
90% of B2B buying agent-intermediated by 2028, channelling over $15 trillion through AI-agent exchanges. — Gartner Strategic Predictions for 2026, reported by Digital Commerce 360.
https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2025/11/28/gartner-ai-agents-15-trillion-in-b2b-purchases-by-2028/
Tariffs and volatility now treated as a permanent condition rather than a shock. — CIPS Q4 2025 Pulse Survey.
https://www.cips.org/about-us/news/procurement-professionals-sound-the-alarm
Relationship management among the top five skills practitioners want to build, level with technology. — CIPS / GEP, Global State of Procurement & Supply 2026.
https://www.cips.org/intelligence-hub/global-procurement-supply-report

Note: the two Gartner figures originate in subscription research (the SCM agentic-AI forecast and the 2026 Strategic Predictions). The links above point to the publicly accessible press release and write-ups that report those figures.