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FRONTIER
Gopinath Polavarapu on why frontier AI benchmarks don’ t matter in supply chain
Every few months, a new AI model claims the top spot on the leaderboards, and every few months, supply chain leaders feel the same pull to chase it. But what determines whether AI works in procurement isn’ t how it scores on a reasoning test. It’ s whether the model fits the shape of the work, comes with a governance structure that can survive an audit, and understands the business it’ s being dropped into. Get those three things right and the choice of the‘ best’ model becomes much less important.
The governance gap
Every decision in procurement eventually needs a paper trail – if a system flags a supplier as compliant, recommends an approval route, or raises a contract risk, someone( an auditor, a regulator, an internal control team) may need to retrace exactly how that conclusion was reached. This gap is wider than most organizations realize: a 2026 Compliance Week survey found that 83 percent of organizations now use AI tools, but only 25 percent have strong governance frameworks around them.
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