AI Revolution in Procurement: Safeguarding Data While Maximising Efficiency
AI is becoming more prevalent in our everyday lives, but what is the impact on us as procurement professionals? While there are benefits to using AI to assist with everyday administrative tasks, there are pitfalls and data protections risks we need to bear in mind. Our Technical Services Director Ian Andrews outlines using AI from an information governance and procurement perspective.
Part One: The Information Governance Perspective
In many NHS bodies and trusts, information governance leads have, with some justification, taken a hard line against including AI tools in the run of business. This has had the inadvertent side effect of driving users to utilise the public tools available like Gemini, ChatGPT4o, and Copilot. So why the resistance? The benefits are clear and with a bit of clever prompt engineering, you can get an AI large language model (LLM) such as the examples above to spit out a credible tender specification, market segment analysis or even with a bit of wrangling, get it to evaluate a tender submission against specified criteria. The time savings are enormous and the quality of output often quite good.
But using these tools carries an inherent risk. Nothing is for free, really. The price you pay for utilising public tools is that your data – the prompt, the answer it gives, and any documents you may have uploaded, are all used by that model to train itself, and to answer future queries. If any of the data you submit to the model is commercially sensitive or contains person identifiable data, realistically, it’s exposed to the public internet and is, in data breach terms, not that different to leaving the printed documents on a train seat. While to my current knowledge there’s no case law around AI-inflicted data breaches, it’s coming, and we will wait to see the possible consequences of this.
Part Two: The Procurement Perspective
Procurement teams are constantly asked to do more with less. With pressure on the health service to deliver cost and efficiency savings why shouldn’t procurement professionals look at the possibilities these tools offer.
Changing policy and new regulations complicate processes; suppliers grow wise to the procurement process and can sometimes attempt to frustrate efficiencies that impact their profit margins. Market research and supplier due diligence all take time. Some of the applications of AI can claw back that time, because AI is a curator of information at speed. An AI search, correctly prompted, can eliminate hundreds of man hours of manual searching and still deliver a more comprehensive overview that the most diligent human researchers could create. However, it’s important to review the information generated by AI and not to rely on the content – and ensure someone with the knowledge reviews the information before sharing it publicly.
Part Three: How To Square the Circle
It is possible to satisfy information governance and still gain the advantages AI can offer. Buying appropriate licencing for one of the large language models can allow you to establish a ‘walled garden’ – an environment inside which the LLM AI will not send it’s data back to its owners to use as training materials, and will only learn based on very specific criteria – such as the procurement regulations, or the data within your system that you mark as safe. This can require some hard work on tagging and categorising data via Microsoft Purview or an equivalent tool – but the result will satisfy both improved AI performance and your IG leads.
It's also worth mentioning the UK Government Playbook for AI, which was published last month, which is accessible, full of useful guidance and outlines many possible pitfalls to avoid.
At NOE CPC, we are moving forward with establishing a safe, compliant, and secure walled garden for procurement AI, which we intend to make available to our members, with the added advantage of our own bespoke prompts and pre-configured tools, including a strategic market analysis tool, and a supplier viability assessment tool, backed up by a data archive of procurement-specific material going back nearly twenty years on a national footprint. We believe this is the future for using these tools in an ethical, compliant and secure way, and for ensuring the massive advantages of the AI revolution are there to help procurement deliver on the ever-increasing demands placed on them.
As is always the case, you square the circle by ensuring both competing priorities are listened to, and a solution is found to deliver the goods. You can’t ignore information governance and security when you deal with AI; but with care, you won’t have to.
If you would like to discuss support or the tools NOE CPC are developing for our members, please get in touch with our team.