Most of the AI conversation inside organisations is about our own program: our tools, our people, our processes, our governance. But step back and look at where your spend actually goes. Managed services. System integrators. Software development partners. COnstruction, engineering and professional services. A material share of your organisation’s AI exposure, and its AI opportunity, doesn’t sit inside your walls at all. It sits in your supply chain, and it’s largely ungoverned.
Start with the opportunity, because it’s real money. Your partners, like you, are exploring AI for its productivity gains, reducing their costs, increasing thier margins. If your suppliers are amplifying their people with AI and your prices, timelines and service levels haven’t moved, the gains are landing in their margin. Ask how they’re using AI to cut incidents, lift quality and accelerate delivery, and expect the answer to show up commercially. Either their costs should be coming down, or their output should be going up.
Then the harder questions, because your suppliers are using AI today whether they’ve declared it or not.
Whose model, and what happens when it’s gone? Picture several critical suppliers, each independently and sensibly, building their delivery on the same frontier model. Then that model is banned in a key jurisdiction, withdrawn, or repriced beyond reach. Your carefully diversified supply chain fails as one, because you diversified the suppliers but not the intelligence underneath them. Almost nobody maps this concentration today.
Where does our data go? When a partner runs your information through their AI tooling, what stops it being absorbed into models and context stores, and surfacing as someone else’s advantage? Deliberately or accidentally, the outcome is the same.
And what are their loops? If a supplier’s AI makes decisions inside a service you consume, what controls, maturity and human checks surround it? Their AI’s silent mistake becomes your trusted input, leading to a poor customer outcome. Their human-in-the-loop is now part of your control environment. Ask for evidence it’s real.
Your supply chain has quietly become part of your AI program. Govern it like it is. The suppliers worth keeping will be open to working with you towards this goal.