The advisory firm Deloitte has conducted a survey of 250 “cognitive aware” leaders in “cognitive active” companies. These are the “front lines” of investment in new technologies.
The technologies included in the survey are:
* Robotic process automation
* Computer vision
* Machine learning
* Natural language processing
* Speech recognition
* Rules-based systems
* Deep learning
* Physical robots
The survey covers people and companies that have actually spent money on these technologies and that have an opinion on whether it was money worth spending.
According to Deloitte, 83% of people surveyed are seeing a modest or substantial benefit from their investments. That’s a very high happiness rating in my experiences of new technology deployments: in the early days there’s usually a lot of time spent wallowing in (Gartner’s famous) Trough of Despair. But I don’t want to quibble the veracity of that particular finding. What interests me more is that investments have been made. For me that raises two questions:
1. Was Procurement involved in those acquisitions?
2. Does Procurement have the skills to support these types of acquisitions.
The survey is silent on this but it’s worth asking yourself, if you’re a procurement practitioner, what you would be able to bring in the acquisition of the above technologies in your category. And then take the opportunity to plug whatever gaps you have in your knowledge before your firm wants to join the ranks of the “cognitive active”. With such high satisfaction being reported, it won’t take long.