GUEST COLUMN.

Think about the last time you drove across a newly paved bridge, walked through a public park, or visited a government website. Behind each of those moments sits a contract, and behind every contract sits public procurement: the processes governments use to acquire essential goods, services, and works. Public procurement allows governments to get everything from pencils and patrol cars to highways, IT systems, and nuclear submarines. When it works, citizens barely notice, but when it fails, people feel the consequences immediately. 

Public procurement is also big business, accounting for more than $15 trillion in annual economic activity, or 12 to 15 percent of global GDP. Contracts shape how governments deliver education, infrastructure, defense, social services, and emergency response. In some localities, nearly every public service is delivered through contracts. As such, public procurement is often the connective tissue, linking what governments promise to what citizens receive.

To deliver high quality services, governments have invested in an increasingly important procurement labor force. Nearly 500,000 people work in contracting-related roles in the United States. Yet, few of these people set out to find careers in public procurement. As a profession, procurement is a hodgepodge of people from all walks of life. Most learn about their work on the job instead of in classrooms or textbooks. Thriving in the middle of swirling pressures, public procurement officials work diligently to get the best deal for governments and citizens. And, in the face of new technologies and competing priorities, their work is changing.

That is what inspired our forthcoming book, “The Essential Guide to Public Procurement: Bridging Theory and Practice.” We wanted to bring together scholars and practitioners from around the world to share what they have learned, so that anyone entering the field today, by choice or by accident, encounters a richer place to start than we did.

Public procurement has evolved from a back-office support process into one of government's most powerful strategic levers. Contracts are now used to advance sustainability goals, promote social equity, spark innovation among small businesses, reshape supply chains, and test emerging technologies. Governments increasingly ask procurement officers not just to buy things but to buy outcomes. 

At the same time, technology is transforming the work itself. E-procurement platforms (cloud-based, B2B software systems that digitize and automate the entire procurement process) are altering routine solicitations. Artificial intelligence (machine learning, natural language processing, and robotic process automation to automate, optimize, and enhance the procurement lifecycle) help with bid evaluation, fraud detection, and risk scoring. Blockchain (a digital ledger) is being tested for transparency. Digital twins (live virtual replicas of physical systems) and additive manufacturing (industrial 3D printing) are reshaping what governments can produce, where, and how fast.

Most conversations about the future of public procurement focus on tools. Which platforms? Which AI vendors? Which dashboards? These are the easier questions. The more interesting one is this: what does competence look like in a procurement system where technology handles more of the transactional work, and humans focus on the judgment-heavy, relational, and creative parts? 

For decades, procurement competence was treated as a mostly individual, technical property. Know the regulations, master the methods, get the paperwork right. Those skills still matter. But technical fluency is now the floor, not the ceiling. What will matter moving forward is the capacity to translate between worlds: between elected officials and supplier markets, between rules and social missions, between algorithmic recommendations and public values. 

What’s more, competence in modern public procurement is no longer primarily an individual responsibility, even for smaller purchases. Procurement decisions are part of a broader ecosystem that includes policymakers, government agencies, service recipients, and suppliers. No single person can master supply chain risk modeling, AI bias auditing, sustainable sourcing, small business policy, performance analytics, and cross-border trade law. The work must be intentionally connective, constantly collaborative, and technically rigorous. Competence now lives in relationships: between officers and program managers, agencies and suppliers, practitioners and researchers, humans and the tools alongside them. 

This points to three practical opportunities. First, ethical judgment becomes the irreplaceable human core. As AI takes on more scoring and recommending, the weight of "why did we actually make this decision?" falls on people not technology. Second, learning becomes continuous and collective. A certification earned a decade ago cannot cover the questions landing on a desk today. Third, so-called soft skills are now hard requirements. Creativity, strategic thinking, negotiation, and relational intelligence are not finishing touches. They are the core of public procurement profession.

Note: “The Essential Guide to Public Procurement: Bridging Theory and Practice” is forthcoming from Routledge / Taylor & Francis, available for pre-order through Routledge Publishing and Amazon. Edited by Benjamin M. Brunjes, Ana-Maria Dimand, and Andrea S. Patrucco, with support from NIGP: The Institute for Public Procurement and the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO). 

The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc

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