Last week we welcomed the AstraZeneca Procurement team to Cambridge.
We spent the day exploring a very practical question: Where can AI genuinely make procurement better?
What made the conversation particularly valuable was the chance to bring real procurement challenges together with current research and try to rethink procurement with AI through six lenses:
- Workflow Reconfiguration
- Decision Intelligence & Adaptive Sensing
- Epistemic Architecture
- Behavioral Decision Architecture
- Human-AI Complementarity & Delegation, and
- Relational Embeddedness.
We leveraged these lenses to map processes, identify where the real bottlenecks are, challenge assumptions, and test where AI could actually add value and where it probably wouldn’t.
This kind of exchange between industry and academia is exactly what we value at the Cambridge Service Alliance: bringing different perspectives into the room, testing ideas together, and turning promising hypotheses into practical experiments.
Thank you to the AstraZeneca team for such an open and thoughtful discussion, plenty to build on from here.