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Free: The AI Pricing Report for Procurement Leaders

AI is changing software spend faster than most procurement teams can keep up with. This report looks at what that means for procurement, from 23% of vendors quietly changing how they charge you in the last two years, to the 37.6% monthly budget variance teams are facing when they get caught unprepared. It also covers what discount leverage you still have, and what to ask for before your next AI renewal.

The Editor’s Letter

HI THERE

Two quick things before we get into it.

The beta tester spots are officially full. Thank you to everyone who put their hand up, I was genuinely moved by the response and I cannot wait to get you into the tools. You will get an email this week.

And the free dinner in Madrid. We are at twenty people. TWENTY. When I put that out I honestly did not know if anyone would apply and now I am going to be sitting around a table at Leña with twenty awesome procurement people and I could not be more excited. Thank you. Truly.

Right, on to the chaos.

The question I get asked most, after anything about procurement AI, is: how do you manage it all? The honest answer is: I don't.

Last week was probably the best evidence of that. I was behind on almost everything, I had people chasing me, I had at least a couple of people who were (understandably) frustrated with me, and I spent most of the week feeling like I was one notification away from completely losing the plot. Having our dog being operated from cancer did not help me.

I got through it. But I did not manage it all. I just about managed most of it, most of the time, and called that a win.

I mention this because a few people have reached out lately asking if I can send them templates they missed while they were free. And I want to be honest with you about this, because I think you deserve the full picture.

This newsletter costs me a few thousand euros a year to run.

The templates I put in the freebie section sometimes take me an entire weekend to build, which is time I am not spending with my children or my husband or, frankly, sleeping. The newsletter itself is free and I want it to stay that way.

The way I make that work is that the templates are free for 48-36 hours and then they sit in the store at a price that helps cover the cost of producing all of this.

I do not make enormous amounts from the store, which means that every single purchase genuinely helps. If I made everything free all the time, I would struggle to justify keeping the newsletter free, and I would rather keep the newsletter free.

So: grab it when it lands, or if you have missed it, consider it a small investment in an independent business that is trying to give you something useful every week.

On that note, a huge thank you to Vertice, whose reports are always free to my readers. Their latest one on AI pricing is genuinely worth your time and you can download it here for free.

Right. Let's get into it.

Procurement by Design

NOT BUILT LIKE THAT

A few years before I started posting on LinkedIn, I used to read the profiles of people who had done it well and whisper to myself some lies.

I would murmur to myself things like:

• She's just naturally like that.

• He has a gift for it.

• That kind of confidence is something you either have or you don't. 

And then I would close the tab and go back to whatever I was doing, feeling completely justified in not trying.

What I was doing, I now understand, was editing their stories.

I was taking everything visible (the following, the recognition, the seemingly effortless way they showed up) and stripping out everything that wasn't. The deleted posts. The months of no engagement. The "what am I even doing" moments I had no access to. And I was using the cleaned-up version to let myself off the hook.

If they were naturally like that, and I was not, then the gap between us was fixed. No effort on my part was going to close it. So why start?

It is an incredibly convenient thing to believe.

I have been in procurement enough time to know we do this to organisations too.

You look at someone else’s function, one that has genuine influence at the C-suite level and all their spend under remit, fully automated and you think: different culture, different leadership, different starting point.

You tell yourself: “We could never get there from here.” And maybe you are right.

But it is also possible that you are editing their story.

That the influence you are observing from the outside was actually ten years of groundwork, stubborn repetition, and a lot of no's that are not visible to you now.

Here is what I know about my own story, and I want to say this plainly because I know some of you look at the numbers and think the same thing I used to think about other people.

I did not start eighteen months ago with a plan.

I published posts that got eleven impressions.

I wrote things I thought were good and discovered nobody really agreed.

I started writing during maternity leave because I had forty minutes while the baby slept and strong opinions I had nowhere else to put. (That was the whole strategy. There was no strategy.)

The following, the newsletter, Procupedia, the course, the decision I am currently mid-way through making about my career: none of it was a bold leap. It was a long, unglamorous sequence of small things that accumulated into something that looks, from the outside, like a moment.

If you are looking at any of that and thinking I'm just not built like that, you are editing my story. You are keeping the visible parts and cutting everything that would make it feel possible for you.

I am not saying your fear is irrelevant, or that the gap between where you are and where you want to be is not real. Sometimes it is enormous and the only honest thing to do is sit with that for a while.

But there is a difference between respecting your fear and building a story around it that makes staying still feel like wisdom.

The people I have admired most in this function are not the ones who were never afraid. They are the ones who kept going while afraid, usually quietly, usually without much fanfare, for longer than anyone noticed.

A few things worth trying if any of this lands:

• When someone's success makes you feel stuck, write down the three things you almost certainly cannot see from where you are standing.

• Stop using other people's highlight reels as evidence about your own ceiling. Their story says nothing about what is possible for you.

• Ask yourself honestly: am I telling myself I am not built like this because it is genuinely true, or because believing it means I do not have to start?

• Find your bullets before you fire the cannonball. If the move you keep putting off feels too big to survive getting wrong, make it smaller first.

• Talk to the person you are envying, or read their work more carefully. The fear and the groundwork are almost always right there.

So here is what I want to ask you.

Whose story have you been editing? Which leader, which colleague, which version of a procurement function are you watching and telling yourself they are simply built differently, when the truth is you just cannot see what happened before the moment you started paying attention?

And what would you do if you let yourself believe that the invisible work was possible for you too?

Hit reply. I read every one.

What's Happening in Procurement Right Now

• Policy: The EU's Omnibus package has cut the CSDDD scope by roughly 70%, raising the in-scope threshold to companies with 5,000+ employees and €1.5bn+ turnover. The compliance deadline also moves from 2026 to 2029.

• Market: Coupa's State of Direct Spend 2026 puts the average cost of supply chain disruption at $16m per organisation per year. 72% expect procurement to become a competitive advantage within three years. Only 39% think it is one today.

• ProcureTech: Coupa launched Coupa Compose at Inspire 2026 this week: a no-code platform to build and deploy AI agents across procurement and supply chain, with outcome-based pricing. AstraZeneca is already running autonomous contract negotiation on it.

Freebie(s) of the week

MY BUSINESS CASE TEMPLATE

Let’s be frank, we are always the last department anyone budgets for.

We spend our careers building the case for other people's investments.

When it comes to our own, most of us are figuring it out from scratch, without the right tools, and usually in a hurry.

I have been on both sides of this: Selling transformation programmes in consulting and justifying headcount and technology for an in-house procurement department.

The business case that gets approved and the one that gets quietly shelved look different for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the idea.

This kit is for any procurement business case:

• New technology

• A resource ask

• A process investment

• Anything where you need a yes from someone who does not automatically see procurement as a priority.

1. The Procurement Business Case Template is a 12-slide PowerPoint built the way a CFO expects to receive information. Recommendation first, evidence second. Risk assessment, implementation roadmap, and financial case all included.

2. The Procurement ROI Calculator is a fully formula-driven Excel workbook. Enter your costs and benefits and it calculates your ROI, payback period, three-year net value, and a sensitivity analysis for when the CFO asks what happens if you only hit 50% of your projections.

3. The Stakeholder Influence Map is the part people skip and then regret. Map every person who can influence the outcome, what they care about, their likely objections, and what you need from them.

It is free for 36 hours. Download it or you will miss it.

Grab it here

Do you want access to other great templates from previous newsletters? Have a look at the full store below:

That’s it for this week.

I will leave you with this week's quote, which comes courtesy of the fact that I have two small children and have therefore seen every episode of Bluey approximately forty seven times. (No complaints. It is genuinely excellent television and I will not hear otherwise.)“n your own race.”

Applies to business cases too, it turns out.

On that note, I am absolutely buzzing to be in Madrid next week. If you are going to be there, come and find me at the AERCE Congress from about midday. I would love to meet some of you in person!

See you next week.

Until next time

Procurement worth reading.