AI is absorbing the work that built Procurement careers and trained its very best people.
Work that not only fortified domain knowledge but also provided the procedural grounding that developed the intrinsic understanding needed to serve its stakeholders.
With the machines now coming for this work very directly - not just in terms of the transactional but also tasks higher up the value chain, such as cognitive and decision-support work - the nature of the function, in terms of size, caliber and focus, needs to be re-engineered very deliberately.
This is work the function need to do for itself - no one is going to do it for them.
Otherwise, Procurement faces an existential risk:
If the work it does is no better than the machines, then why not just let the machines do all of the work?
This book is about how we solve for that problem - focused squarely on the talent issue.
It is not a book about technology, and it’s not a book about redesigning the function.
It’s about the people inside it: what endures when the machines take everything else, how a practitioner builds toward this new world deliberately, how the next generation develops when the developmental chain is broken, and what leaders must do to build teams that will still matter in 2030.
What’s in it
Drawn from more than three decades of Procurement experience and more than a year of research at Proquria, the book builds on the thought leadership on this site to cover:
The Future-Proofing Model in full - the Enabling Layer, the Differentiating Layer, and the Orientation Lens, with the playbook to diagnose, build and sustain it
The Apprenticeship Crisis and the rebuild needed - including the plan of action for junior practitioners
The Leadership Agenda - covering capability priorities, the manager’s role, and how to hire, assess and promote when everyone presents as competent and all of the old signals are gone
Tools, templates and diagnostics not published on the site
Case studies and real-world narratives from three decades at The Smart Cube, Kearney and Procurement functions across every industry worldwide
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Omer Abdullah is the founder of Proquria, a thought leadership platform helping Procurement practitioners future-proof their careers for a post-AI world. He brings 35 years of management consulting and global corporate experience across North America, Europe, and APAC, and more than three decades working alongside Procurement practitioners worldwide.
Omer co-founded The Smart Cube in the early 2000s, bootstrapping it into one of the world’s leading Procurement Intelligence and Analytics platforms before its sale to WNS in December 2022. Earlier in his career, he held roles at A.T. Kearney, Warner Lambert (U.S.), and The Perrier Group (Asia-Pacific).
Through Proquria, he writes on how AI is reshaping Procurement work — and what it takes for practitioners to stay relevant, and valuable, as the profession transforms.