Art of Procurement17 Sep 2025

BTW EP 18: It's Getting Real: AI, Procurement, and the End of Savings Theater with Jason Busch

"We can all claim savings without necessarily achieving the result."

This stark observation from Jason Busch sums up decades of dysfunction in how procurement measures their impact and why AI may finally force a (much-needed) reckoning with reality.

In this episode of "Buy: The Way...To Purposeful Procurement," Jason joins co-hosts Philip Ideson and Rich Ham to explore how artificial intelligence might finally solve procurement's validation problem… but only if organizations abandon their addiction to "claiming savings" and start measuring what actually matters: EBITDA.

As a co-founder of FreeMarkets and a founder of Spend Matters, Jason has witnessed 25 years of procurement's evolution from the inside, and he's not pulling any punches.

Instead, he offers a radical proposition: procurement should function as economic "detectives" gathering evidence of spend crimes, then "prosecutors" holding suppliers accountable based on that evidence. The technology finally exists to make this possible, but it will require procurement to abandon the comfortable fiction of projected savings in favor of the uncomfortable truth of EBITDA impact.

The implications of this approach extend beyond individual organizations. Jason frames procurement's societal purpose as "public defenders against rampant cost escalation," suggesting that when buyer-side flaws enable seller-side exploitation, the ultimate losers are consumers who absorb these costs through higher prices.

According to Jason, the question isn't whether technology will transform procurement… It's whether procurement will transform themselves enough to leverage that technology purposefully and for the good of the business.

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