The Thing That Has to Come Before Critical Thinking About AI

There's a report worth reading right now.

CIPS recently gathered nine different perspectives across the profession to wrestle with one of the most pressing questions in our profession: is AI removing jobs or enabling change?

The perspectives are rich and, at times, contradictory. One voice warns of a "lights out" supply chain function by 2028. Another says the doom and gloom is overblown. A third simply observes that AI is already changing the conversation at the leadership table.

All of them, though, are talking about what comes after a decision to adopt AI.

I want to talk about what comes before.

The stage that most teams skip

Every conversation I have with Procurement teams about AI eventually circles back to the same frustration: people are either charging ahead without thinking or hanging back and watching the world change around them.

What sits underneath both of those responses, more often than not, is psychological safety.

This isn't a skills gap, nor a technology gap. It's a trust gap.

The ability to say "I don't know how to use this yet" without feeling exposed. The ability to try something, get it wrong, and not have it counted against you. The ability to question whether an AI output is actually reliable - and to say so out loud in a meeting - without being dismissed as the person who's slowing things down.

Without that foundation, you can hand your team the best AI tools in the world and still end up with two camps: those who use it uncritically and those who resist it loudly and feel left behind.

Neither of those is the outcome you need.

How this plays out will also depend on your team's make-up; how many introverts you have, how many people prefer to sense and observe before they act. (If you're curious about what that looks like in your team, ask me about Insights Discovery).

What this asks of you as a Procurement leader

This isn't about becoming an AI expert. It's about how you show up in the room.

It means being the first to say "I tried this and it didn't quite work, here's what I learned from it." It means making space in team conversations for the person who says "I'm not sure I trust this output" rather than shutting that down in the name of momentum.

It requires honesty, the willingness to experiment and to share the results. The encouragement of the team to follow suit and also experiment. Share your fears, your worries, your hopes and your cynicism - whichever part of the spectrum you sit on. Offer your insights and share what you're doing about it. The team will feel safe to do the same.

What this asks at team level

For your team, psychological safety around AI looks like having clear, shared team norms - not just policies. Agreed team norms are the bedrock of psychological safety and high-performing teams.

What does good use of AI actually look like in your context? What's the expectation around checking outputs? Who is the person you can go to when you are not sure? Is it acceptable to say "I used AI for this" or does that still feel risky?

Wame Sedirwa, one of the practitioners in the CIPS report, raises something important about colleagues who face career consequences for trying to introduce AI solutions. When innovators get penalised for experimenting with AI to improve efficiency, the message that lands across the whole team is: keep your head down and do it the old way.

That is the opposite of what high-performing Procurement teams need right now.

What I'm seeing in the teams I work with

In some of the team coaching work I do with Procurement teams, AI has come up, interestingly not as a directive from leadership, but as a conversation the team itself has surfaced.

What happens in those sessions is something I find quite encouraging. Rather than someone announcing a decision that everyone else has to get behind, the team works through it together. They name what excites them, what worries them, what they don't yet know. They talk about what they need from each other to feel safe enough to try. They share their own experiments and learnings for others to explore. And they make a collective decision about how they want to move forward.

That collective decision matters more than most leaders realise. When a team chooses something together, the commitment to it - and the accountability to each other - is completely different to being told what to do. Trust is built in the process, not just in the outcome.

The teams who go through that kind of conversation aren't necessarily the most tech-savvy. But they are the ones who are most likely to use AI well, question it honestly, and keep talking about it as it evolves.

The critical thinking piece

Here's the bit that matters most to me as a coach.

Critical thinking about AI is not a skill you can train in isolation. Nor is it something you can just switch on. It only happens in an environment where people feel safe enough to question things. If your culture rewards acceptance and speed, you will get a team that accepts AI outputs at face value and moves fast - and that carries real risk.

The CIPS report makes this point repeatedly, from multiple angles. AI is only as good as the data going in. It can be used to represent information in a way that sounds authoritative but isn't. Outputs need to be interrogated, not just acted upon.

These are not just technical warnings. They are leadership warnings. They require people who trust their own judgement enough to push back...and a team culture that makes that feel worthwhile.

Your job, as a Procurement leader, is to build the conditions for that kind of thinking to thrive, before the AI conversation even properly begins.

A question to sit with

If someone in your team had a real concern about an AI output this week - about its accuracy, its ethics, or whether it was even the right tool to use - would they feel comfortable raising it with you?

That answer tells you everything about where to start.

Want to have this conversation with your team?

If AI has come up (or you sense it's about to) and you want to create the space for your team to work through it together and make a collective decision, I offer team coaching sessions designed to do exactly that.

Not a training day and certainly not a tool demo! A real conversation, with your team, about how you want to move forward and what you need to build to do it well.

Get in touch and let's talk about what that could look like for you.