{"podcast":{"title":"Art of Procurement","slug":"art-of-procurement-322079","podcast_index_feed_id":322079,"rss_url":"https://artofprocurement.libsyn.com/rss","website_url":"http://artofprocurement.com","image_url":"https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/5/c/7/a/5c7aae1ec778dd63e55e3c100dce7605/Art_of_Procurement_podcast_cover.png","author":"Philip Ideson","episode_count":907,"summary":"Learn from procurement experts. Host Philip Ideson talks with thought leaders who share the trends, strategies and tactics that you can lever to elevate the role of procurement - and your career.","last_synced_at":"2026-06-08T22:19:35.180866+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/art-of-procurement-322079"},"episode":{"title":"BTW EP 27: Data or Delusion? Procurement's Future Runs on Truth","slug":"btw-ep-27-data-or-delusion-procurement-s-future-runs-on-truth","published_at":"2026-03-18T10:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/art-of-procurement-322079/btw-ep-27-data-or-delusion-procurement-s-future-runs-on-truth","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/art-of-procurement-322079","url":"https://artofprocurement.libsyn.com/btw-ep-27-data-or-delusion-procurements-future-runs-on-truth","audio_url":"https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/artofprocurement/BTW-Ep-27-Jason-Busch-Audio.mp3?dest-id=323169","summary":"Procurement doesn't have a data problem. It has a data delusion. For 25 years, the function has told itself the same story: if we can just clean up our spend, we'll finally be in control. And yet here we are… swimming in the same dashboards, drowning in fields, and still struggling to answer a simple question: what do we spend? In this episode of Buy: The Way…To Purposeful Procurement, Jason Busch, founder of Spend Matters and now a self-described builder of AI \"co-workers,\" returns to the podcast to pressure-test BuyLaw #5: \"prioritize comprehensive, high-quality data.\" If procurement wants to operate in a world of AI employees, continuous validation, and P&L accountability, their data cannot remain partial, fragmented, or shaped by suppliers. Jason draws a sharp distinction between the roles or entities that manage procurement data: copilots, agents, and what he calls digital co-workers (multi-agent infrastructures capable of executing complex work autonomously). But all that capability comes with a catch. When the marginal cost of activity drops toward zero, the absolute risk of bad data increases exponentially. Humans have the battle scars and the intuition to know when something isn't quite right with the data. AI doesn't, unless we explicitly teach it what 'right' looks like. That's where procurement's comfort with incomplete data becomes dangerous. For decades, the function has relied on narrow slices of information: negotiated price, historical spend, maybe a market index or two, but in an AI-enabled world, that's insufficient. Jason explains why context means everything – supplier financial health, commodity forecasts, tariffs, inventory signals, competitive pricing, risk data, contract performance signals, governance structures, and the cultural guardrail…","meta_description":"Procurement doesn't have a data problem. It has a data delusion. For 25 years, the function has told itself the same story: if we can just clean up our sp…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2590,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/art-of-procurement-322079/episodes/btw-ep-27-data-or-delusion-procurement-s-future-runs-on-truth/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/art-of-procurement-322079/btw-ep-27-data-or-delusion-procurement-s-future-runs-on-truth.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}