The AI Dividend: Four Ways Procurement is Re-defining Services in 2025 and 2026

In this season of reflection, I am grateful to be at Brightfield working with the world’s best procurement leaders. And especially now: I’ve never seen such rapid change in our discipline across every sector: tech, manufacturing, financial services, pharma, and more. This change includes seismic shifts that are here to stay: I’ll unpack two that dominated 2025, and two we expect to accelerate in 2026.

2025 Shift 1: AI on Every Procurement Desktop

While products like TDX are several generations deep applying machine learning models for calculations and predictions, 2025 is the year that AI moved from behind the scenes to center stage. Wildly accessible LLM tools ChatGPT, Grok, Claude and others have made AI a daily resource for legions of enterprise workers. Sourcing professionals are among the most active adopters, leveraging AI for market research, solution comparison, text analysis, and even supplier communication. Meanwhile, senior execs acknowledge that the most successful deployments are led by outside firms, positioning procurement as the primary gateway for external AI expertise (State of AI in Business 2025, MIT NANDA).

If ever there was a “killer category” to showcase procurement’s value to the firm, we have it now in artificial intelligence.

2025 Shift 2: SOW Savings is Primary

Over 90% of new Brightfield clients in 2025 cite SOW savings as their primary goal—up from roughly 50% in 2022. Why such focus now and not before? Like a remote untapped oil field with deep reserves, services procurement has long been a promising but tricky source of potential savings: a vast “other” category typically deprioritized due to complexity and variety. But the cost-benefit analysis has recently changed on both sides of the equation. First, the need to pursue cost reduction has persisted post-pandemic amid tariff concerns, global conflicts, and expected large scale disruption from AI. At the same time, the cost of reaching those savings has dropped radically, as focused tools like TDX’s SOW extraction and Rate Analysis are untangling the spend and prescribing highly attainable steps to optimization.This is more than an SOW savings moment, it’s an emerging new normal being baked into workflows and expectations. Brightfield clients are changing processes to embed value: reviewing scope and milestones before signature, calculating rate should-costs, catching renewals months in advance to align cost and terms to competitive market levels, and more. Given the tech-led ease of adoption and the measurable materiality of the return, there’s no good reason to take eyes off the category.To recap: as the year wraps, we can bank on AI as a daily sourcing tool and SOW savings as a priority. Now looking forward, how do we expect the sourcing environment to change? Fortunately, there’s good news on both cost and risk.

2026 Trend 1: Fewer AI-Accelerated Roles on SOWs

As customers are starting to demand an AI dividend from their suppliers, we are beginning to see efficiencies appear in SOWs. If an AI-aided developer is 50% more productive, shouldn’t firms be able to buy the same coding outcomes for less effort? In fact, this dynamic is beginning to appear across many roles and we expect in 2026 it will gather speed. Comparing the first half of 2024 to the first half of 2025, the percentage of AI-Accelerated Roles decreased from 58.8% to 54.8% of all roles. Given the dramatic advances in both technology and awareness in 2025, we expect to see this trend advance forcefully. (Findings based on Brightfield standard Market Title Taxonomy and Microsoft’s “AI Applicability Score” detailed in Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI, July 2025). How well is your firm capturing the AI dividend from your suppliers? (Drop me a note if you’d like to discuss.)

2026 Trend 2: More True Result-based Agreements

While a statement of work has always been supposed to—well—state work; the reality is that the dominant share of contracts are based on resource cost.

TDX analysis reveals 43% of all SOWs are de facto staff augmentation, with effectively no transfer of outcome risk to the supplier.

Some companies aim to address this long-recognized problem by mandating a certain percentage of milestone-based agreements, but even among those contracts, roughly half of the milestones are driven by labor rates. I find this aspect of services procurement absolutely confounding. The sellers are supposed to be experts and should be willing to take on risk; the buyers should know what outcomes they want and what they’re worth. But both sides hedge. It’s like getting in a cab, starting the meter, and driving all over town without a destination in mind. Paying for time is a lazy shortcut for buyers and sellers alike that fosters fuzzy requirements, scope creep, and waste.But the times are a-changing, and we are moving toward a more balanced risk-split that will improve outcomes for buyers and reward suppliers who deliver results and stand behind their work. There are two reasons why this is happening, both fueled by AI. First, technology provides increasing visibility. Last year our product team released TDX fake-fixed-fee detection, which identifies milestones driven by labor cost and cites the reasoning. Milestone tables that are in fact no more than a billing schedule are instantly flagged, as are squishy deliverables like progress reports and updates. Clients can then address, either by changing the language to make a milestone align to a true outcome, or by crafting a legitimate time and materials agreement with rates driven by TDX market insights. Secondly, suppliers are eager to capture their own portion of the AI dividend. The potential for greater profit from lower execution cost is a powerful incentive, particularly for firms that are smaller or focused on a specific function or technology. As AI apps and specialized firms emerge to challenge the generalists whose hourly rates can fix your every problem… we see more targeted solutions that efficiently solve specific problems.

A Bright Future Awaits

We’ll share more of our findings on how AI is changing the extended workforce labor mix and delivering efficiency in worker mix, deliverables, and more. Stay tuned. The TDX product team has major advances in the works for 2026 to improve quality, cost, and risk in services procurement which we’ll be sharing along with marketplace data. And as much as we love the trends, what matters most is your team and your program. We’d love to help you join the industry leaders and bring more value to your company. Please reach out with any comments or questions. Cheers, and all the best for the New Year!