We asked public procurement professionals whether their agencies have adopted or are planning to adopt AI. The results reveal a wide range of adoption levels and attitudes, reflecting a profession that hasn’t reached consensus on how to fit AI into public procurement.”
27% of respondents have active AI in their procurement workflows. 25% say it is not in their near-term or long-term plan. The rest are either evaluating or uncertain.
There’s no shortage of confident predictions of Artificial Intelligence in business, and that includes public procurement. Vendor pitches, conference keynotes, and industry coverage all suggest that transformation is imminent or already underway.
But the data from our 2026 State of AI in Procurement survey tells a more complicated story.
When we asked procurement professionals whether their agency has adopted or piloted AI-powered tools or programs in their procurement workflows, the responses were divided roughly three ways.
The first 27% answered yes in some form – they have either deployed dedicated tools, integrated AI capabilities into existing platforms, or completed a pilot program.
Another 25% said no, AI tools were not in their current process and were not part of either their short-term or long-term plans.
The remaining half were in between: either actively evaluating, waiting on a policy framework from leadership, or unsure where their agency stood.
Agencies with annual budgets over $100M were likely to adopt AI in procurement at nearly triple the rate of agencies under $5M. This is no surprise – large cities and metropolitan areas have much more budget room for new technology and tools than small townships and special districts.
There are, of course, other typical barriers for smaller agencies, like limited IT staff, small procurement teams, and no infrastructure or bandwidth for evaluating or implementing new tools.
If your agency is under $20M – and 67% of our respondents are – AI adoption is a realistic near-term goal, but it requires a different planning approach than in larger agencies.
There’s also a matter of who is taking the reins in evaluating and adopting new technology. For 25% of the agencies in our survey, no individual or functional role is actively pushing AI adoption forward in the procurement process. And when someone is driving it, they are more likely to come from IT or senior leadership than from the procurement staff.
Procurement professionals who understand their workflows, their compliance obligations, and their documentation requirements are better positioned than anyone to shape how AI enters their purchasing process, and they’ll have more control and more success if they choose to lead the conversation rather than wait until a tool is forced upon them.
The first step is knowing which camp you’re in. If your agency has already piloted or deployed AI tools, the question is documentation. Do you have a policy governing use? Do you have an audit trail that would hold up under scrutiny?
If your agency is in the uncertain middle, what is specifically blocking you? Whether it’s budget, policy, leadership alignment, or IT capacity, each requires a different approach.
If your agency is firmly in the “no” camp for now, you must still ask yourself if you’re prepared for the moment when leadership or legislation makes the question unavoidable.
The full 2026 State of AI in Procurement Report covers all five key findings from the survey, with practical guidance on policy, audit trail design, and how to run a responsible first pilot.
Download it below to get the insights you need for smarter AI adoption, either now or down the road.