North Highland's expert in procurement change and transformation, Angela Courtney, recently attended DPW New York, where procurement leaders and AI innovators gathered in Brooklyn under the conference's 2026 theme: RECODE. The signal across two days was consistent: procurement has stopped waiting to be disrupted and has started doing the disrupting. Here are three ideas that stood out across the event.
One reality kept surfacing across sessions: procurement change efforts fail because organizations treat change like a temporary project with a finish line.
The most successful rollouts at DPW were measured by whether people's daily behaviors had actually shifted, long after the go-live dates and vendor roadmap milestones were behind them. Tools dropped into an enterprise without sustained process alignment and people support produce a predictable outcome: low adoption, workarounds, and frustration.
Three things separated the organizations making progress from those spinning their wheels:
Success metrics tied to long-term behavioral change, not launch-day activity
Continuous reinforcement rather than one-time training and communication
Leadership willing to model the new way of working, openly and consistently
The framing that generated the most conversation at DPW came down to a single word. "Human in the loop" became "human in the lead."
AI is accelerating the ability to analyze information, identify patterns, and automate work at a scale that was not practical three years ago. But the organizations positioned to capture that value are the ones pairing emerging technology with deep domain expertise, sound judgment, and clear accountability. The size of the tech stack matters less than the judgment behind it.
A few points that sharpened that argument:
AI can generate recommendations. It cannot replace the experience and accountability that make those recommendations worth acting on.
Context quality drives output quality, whether you are working with AI or with people.
The greatest opportunity is partnership: procurement professionals working alongside scientists, clinicians, engineers, product developers, and other domain experts to tackle problems that neither could solve alone.
For organizations in regulated industries like life sciences, where supplier decisions carry clinical and compliance stakes, this distinction is not academic. The judgment layer is the differentiator.
Gone are the days of procurement as a back-office function measured by cost savings alone. The conversation at DPW has shifted to what procurement can do when it sits at the table earlier: accelerating innovation cycles, managing supplier risk before it surfaces, strengthening ecosystems, and creating measurable enterprise value that shows up beyond the P&L.
That shift requires more than tools. It requires leadership that sets a new normal and sustains it. AI creates possibilities; leadership determines whether those possibilities become practice. Transformation sticks only when everyday behaviors and leadership reinforcement align over time, not just at launch.
Partners who understand both sides of that equation, the technology and the organizational change required to make it land, become a competitive advantage. It’s part of why North Highland's recent partnership with ORO Labs brings value beyond implementation: connecting AI-powered procurement technology with the change strategy needed for adoption that actually holds.
A thread running underneath nearly every DPW session was this: access to AI is becoming universal. The differentiator will not be who has it. It will be the leaders who can combine technology, expertise, curiosity, and sound decision-making to drive change that lasts.
The procurement organizations coming out ahead are not waiting for perfect conditions. They are leaning into the changes, enabling their teams to do the same, and building the capability to keep learning as the tools evolve.
At North Highland, our Procurement practice collaborates with organizations navigating exactly this moment: building the people strategy and technical foundation to make AI investments actually deliver. If you want to talk through what this means for your team, let’s talk.