2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) survey

The 2025 Deloitte Global Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) Survey finds procurement at a true inflection point, with ever increasing external and internal complexity alongside both the challenges and promise of technology disruption fuelled by the rise of Generative AI (GenAI) and Agentic AI. Procurement is used to being asked to do more with less, but with increased pressure from an inflationary global market and an emerging trade war, those aims have become harder to achieve.

Equipping the next generation of the workforce with the right skills and capabilities will be a critical differentiator for those companies that become Digital Masters. A digital-adept and digital-capable workforce will only help organizations accelerate their ability to achieve their strategic priorities and deliver value to the business, which will become more challenging with a more quickly evolving external environment.

Procurement at a Critical Inflection Point

Although procurement is taking on more responsibility and delivering more value, this success has increased demand for its services in the increasingly complex and volatile global trade environment, and in a resource-constrained internal environment. Many CPOs are focusing on digital procurement and artificial intelligence (AI), betting that these emerging solutions will help them solve this dilemma. Can these bets on digital and AI in procurement pay off? This twelfth edition of the Deloitte Global CPO Survey captures insights with more than 250 CPOs across 40 countries and reveals procurement’s continued push toward digital transformation. We also find that the Digital Masters in the study are making substantial, but focused bets on technology and operating model changes.

Investment Trends: Technology as a Priority

CPOs are telling us that enterprise-aligned digital transformation and disciplined GenAI adoption are the means to deliver on this expanding value proposition. They’re voting with real investment, allocating approximately 20% of their budget to procurement technology (nearly 2x the relative investment reported in 2023.)

Beyond ERP: Expanding Enterprise Capabilities

This tech-for-labour swap is more pervasive at Digital Masters that are extricating themselves from lower-value tasks to focus on higher-impact value creation. These Digital Masters are becoming agents of change within their organizations by making smart bets on a portfolio of iterative self-funding, cross-functional projects. These projects go beyond traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) and source-to-pay (S2P) transformations to improve broader enterprise capabilities, such as third-party risk management (TPRM)2, tariff management, commercial management and the underlying technology-enabled process orchestration, analytics, and data management, to power them. By the same token, in addition to placing bets on digital, Digital Masters are placing bets on equipping their workforces with the next generation of skills and capabilities to excel in the age of digital.

Measurable Returns from GenAI and Emerging Technologies

These bets are paying off, with digital leaders demonstrating superior outcomes across all performance metrics, including cost savings, stakeholder influence and satisfaction, as well as risk management. Their digital literacy and ability to leverage emerging technologies, particularly GenAI, advanced analytics and emerging agentic capabilities, deliver measurable returns. Digital Masters achieved an average 2.8x return on GenAI investments, while Followers saw only 1.6x.

A Roadmap for CPOs to Become Agents of Change

This report provides a road map for CPOs to accelerate their evolution to become true agents of change, capable of helping their organizations safely capture the power of increasingly digital supply markets while freeing precious resources to focus on higher-value strategic activities.