AI for Procurement Capstone Exercise — AI for Procurement Professionals

What you'll learn

Apply skills from across this course — supplier vetting, sourcing strategy, negotiation prep, risk screening, and governance — in a single realistic category management scenario
Produce a concrete, role-relevant sourcing and negotiation package using AI tools
Self-assess your output against professional procurement quality criteria

Procurement professionals rarely get to apply one technique from this course in isolation — a real category review under budget pressure requires sourcing judgment, negotiation preparation, risk screening, and governance discipline all at once, on a deadline. This capstone puts you in that position: build a sourcing and negotiation package for a category facing a hard savings target, using AI to accelerate the drafting while exercising the commercial and risk judgment no AI tool can supply on its own.

Capstone Exercise

Build a Sourcing and Negotiation Package Under Budget Pressure

Context

You are the category manager for indirect packaging spend at a mid-sized consumer goods company, with an annual category spend of approximately 6.2 million dollars across four suppliers, including one incumbent representing 55% of the category's volume. Finance has set a 12% savings target for this category this fiscal year, to be delivered through either renegotiation of the incumbent or a re-competed sourcing event. You have six weeks before your findings are due to the CFO.

Your Task

Use Claude or ChatGPT to produce a first draft of each of the following five sections of a sourcing and negotiation package: (1) A spend and should-cost summary identifying where the incumbent's pricing may have drifted from a defensible cost basis, using assumptions you specify explicitly; (2) A short sourcing brief (RFQ-lite) for two to three candidate alternative suppliers, with a specific category scope, volume, and evaluation criteria; (3) A vetting and risk screening summary structure for the candidate suppliers, covering financial stability, certifications, and sanctions/ESG screening status; (4) A negotiation prep brief for the incumbent renewal conversation, identifying at least three leverage points; (5) A one-paragraph governance note listing which of the AI-drafted outputs above require a named human sign-off before being acted on, and why. For each of the five sections, write one annotation directly below the AI draft identifying the specific human judgment call, real data point, or verification step the AI could not supply and that you would need to confirm before the package goes to the CFO.

Your notes (optional)

Deliverable

A five-section sourcing and negotiation package of 600 to 750 words with one annotation per section identifying the human judgment call or verification requirement the AI could not supply. The package demonstrates where AI accelerates procurement analysis and drafting, and where the category manager's commercial and risk judgment remains irreplaceable.

Quick check

The capstone tells you to set the evaluation criteria and their weighting yourself rather than asking the model to produce them. Why is the line drawn there?

Select one answer.

Key takeaways

A real category review under budget pressure draws on sourcing, negotiation, risk, and governance skills simultaneously — treating them as separate techniques rather than an integrated package is not how procurement work actually happens under deadline.
AI accelerates the first draft of every section in a sourcing and negotiation package, but the specific assumptions behind a should-cost model, the weighting of evaluation criteria, and the verification of any risk flag remain the category manager's responsibility.
A governance note that names who signs off on which AI-assisted output before it becomes an action is not a bureaucratic add-on — it is what makes a fast, AI-accelerated package defensible when it reaches a CFO or an auditor.
The annotation discipline practiced in this capstone is a professional habit worth keeping in real procurement work: whenever AI drafts a document that will influence a spend or supplier decision, mark the sections that require human verification before that document leaves your hands.