Federico Gomez

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…

Stay up to date on all the latest conversations, interviews, and episodes we released this week here at Supply Chain Now! We started this week off with a very special episode of Supply Chain Now. Host Scott Luton and special co-host Allison Giddens get to converse with a pair of very powerful women in the manufacturing business. Scott and Allison talk with Stacey Schroeder the President and Founder of EVelop; and the Value Improvement Project Engineer at Polaris Industries, Coral Huffmaster. Together they discuss the Key Takeaways from the 2021 Women in Manufacturing Summit. For Monday’s This Week In Business History episode, Kelly Barner explores a car invention that was created over 120 years ago. On Tuesday, we released a new episode of Supply Chain Now with Scott Luton and Greg White. This episode features two of Manhattan Associates’ reputable representatives. Rob Schaefer the Vice President of Transportation Management Sales and Gregg Lanyard the Director of Product Management for Manhattan Associates. During this episode, they all offer their perspectives on the supply chain outlook for 2022. On Wednesday we released an episode of Logistics With Purpose with host Enrique Alvarez and Kristi Porter. This episode features Michael Broidy the Senior…