State of the Procurement Profession 2026: Results presented exclusively at ISM World

On April 28, 2026, Christoph Bode and Ruth Schültken presented the results of the 2026 wave of the State of the Procurement Profession Survey in Denver, Colorado. The session marked the first public release of the data, shared exclusively with the audience attending ISM World, the annual conference of the Institute for Supply Management (ISM). 

The 2026 wave is the eighth consecutive annual study conducted at the Endowed Chair of Procurement and the fifth year of our collaboration with ISM. Among the headline findings: AI in procurement remains pre-scale, with 80 percent of organizations still in exploration or pilot phase and not a single respondent reporting AI as scaled and embedded in core processes. “Structure” has meanwhile overtaken “technology” as the most significant performance roadblock since 2024, and procurement professionals' satisfaction with their own organization has reached an eight-year low.

The full executive summary is available for download here.