Christine Chidoub

Companies are rapidly integrating generative AI into procurement and sourcing decisions. The promise is obvious. AI can read thousands of pages of supplier proposals faster than any human team, summarize technical requirements in seconds, and create the appearance of consistency and objectivity in evaluation. But there is an important distinction managers are starting to overlook. The same AI system that performs extremely well at identifying whether a supplier meets minimum requirements may perform much less reliably when judging which supplier is truly better. Recent research published in the Journal of Business Logistics examined this issue by comparing how large language models evaluated supplier bids against evaluations completed by experienced procurement professionals. It analyzed 123 supplier proposals tied to 31 public procurement projects conducted by the State of Ohio between 2023 and 2024. The projects involved complex IT services contracts, many containing large, text-heavy bid packages requiring evaluative judgment rather than simple arithmetic comparisons. The researchers tested three reasoning-oriented AI models: OpenAI o3, Grok-3-Mini, and DeepSeek R1. They then compared their evaluations against human procurement scores. The findings revealed a surprisingly clear pattern. AI performed well when evaluating compliance signals. These are signals tied to baseline qualifications and technical requirements. Does…

It’s a supply chain summer! Check out all the latest conversations, interviews, and episodes we released this week here at Supply Chain Now. On Monday, we released 3 new episodes! On this episode of Supply Chain Now, Ratelinx’s Nate Endicott, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Alliances, and Andrew Hooser, Vice President of Customer Solutions, discuss their company’s journey with Co-hosts Greg White and Scott Luton. On This Week in Business History, host Scott W. Luton picks up on the story of 3 legendary pioneers: Marie Curie, Alan Turing and Ed Bradley. On Supply Chain Now en Espanol, host Enrique Alvarez welcomes special guest Demos Perez to the podcast to get an update on supply chain and logistics in Panama and the rest of Latin America. On Tuesday, Mike Griswold, Vice President of Research at Gartner, joined our hosts Scott Luton and Greg White on the Supply Chain Now podcast to talk about the latest in retail supply chains from an analyst’s perspective. On Wednesday, Gifts for Good’s Chief Impact Officer Jenise Steverding joined our Logistics with Purpose podcast to share how she melded a knack for logistics with a propensity for giving back with hosts Enrique Alvarez and…