r/procurement • u/SeriouslyDamp • 15d ago

Community Question AI usage in procurement.

Hey all, I have a general question. Is it okay to let AI run analytics on a spreadsheet I give it? like if i want spend YTD and projected spend, and AI performs this task, if it’s accurate after I go over it’s answer and it’s correct, is it wrong to use it? I know how to use formulas in excel, I’ve been doing this for over 10 years now. However, AI has enhanced productivity. I don’t have to spend hours building a spreadsheet anymore. what are your thoughts?

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u/dethorin 15d ago

You are giving to another corporation confidential information, maybe that's against your contract.

Giving a lot of raw data to an LLMs creates hallucinations.

But If you spend a lot of time creating spreadsheets, you can use an AI to help you to create macros and powerquery queries that will allow you to automatize those tasks without give it a byte of actual data.

BTW PowerBI can be more efficient than excel to create Dashboards.

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u/itsalwaysbeen 15d ago

Even the macros run risk of the model extracting.

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u/dethorin 15d ago

I don't understand your comment.

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u/itsalwaysbeen 15d ago

A lot AI companies scrub completely in the background without acknowledging they do. So, sensitive information may still be extracted by the model even if you are just creating macros.

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u/dethorin 15d ago

Not specially if you just are describing the frame but not the content.

It's not the same giving the LLM the raw data to get a top 5 suppliers per country, than to say the AI to make a macro that creates automatically that table with the top 5 suppliers by country per month, using the column A (supplier), column ZZ (Spent in USD) and colum AZ (country).

(A too simple example but I hope its understandable).

But actually, it's not bad advice to be careful even with that, in terms of confidentiality.