Lessons from four decades of change for AI in procurement, and why Texas universities
should lead rather than wait and see
In 2006, UT Health Science Center at Houston went live with SciQuest e-procurement. At the time, most of higher education still bought supplies on paper. Faculty saw purchasing as a barrier, a set of state rules standing between a researcher and the reagents they needed. Many of our peers chose to wait. They wanted to see whether the technology would work, whether suppliers would put up catalogs, and whether faculty would use it.
We moved early, and it was not painless. Early adoption is risky. But by 2009, when I presented our results to the UT System Purchasing Council, the question for most campuses was no longer whether to adopt B2B procurement but how fast. Within a few years, the institutions that waited were implementing the same technology under more pressure, with less time to learn, and with the early movers' results being used as the yardstick.
Artificial intelligence is now arriving in procurement and contracting, and I see the same pattern starting again. This time, Texas has also written new rules that put procurement offices at the center of how universities buy and govern AI. My message to fellow procurement professionals is simple: this is a change to lead, not one to wait out.
