Why carrots and sticks fail to drive procurement adoption

Executive sponsorship alone won't get an employee base to reliably follow the procurement process.

I've seen it myself, watching companies get the ‘mandate from CFO’ emails and stern reminders in the all-hands; spend still flows through side doors within a month.

Those side doors are getting busier. In Zip's State of AI in Spend’ research, 36% said non-procurement teams increased their direct purchasing of technology or services without procurement involvement over the past year.

In my experience, most of these buyers would follow the policy if following it were easy to do so. Yet they go around it because the process in front of them is full of friction no one has removed.

Why the stick fails to drive procurement compliance

A mandate is a stick. Sticks work, but only in a narrow way.

A 2013 study in Information Systems Research surveyed employees at companies where ERP use was mandatory. ‘Punishment expectancy,’ or the fear of getting caught, strongly predicted compliance. Reward expectancy had no significant effect. A 2022 study on information security policy found the same split.

Enforcement-only cultures produce a specific outcome. People comply exactly as much as they think they'll be watched, and route around the policy everywhere else.

Zip's survey shows how that plays out with AI tools. 47% of leaders say their organization buys AI through a centralized procurement or IT review, yet 57% have personally used AI tools for work that their employer hasn't actually sanctioned or provided. Note that these are procurement, finance, IT, and operations leaders, the people presumably closest to the policy.

Routing around the rules is a rational response to a process slower and more confusing than expensing something or looping in a vendor directly. A hard mandate can force one purchase through the front door, but it can't stop the next ten from finding a side one.

Why the carrot doesn't fix low procurement adoption

The opposite instinct is to reward good behavior and celebrate the teams who follow the process. It sounds better and has the same blind spot.

It still treats adoption as a motivation problem, something you solve by changing how people feel about the policy. Procurement leaders point somewhere else. In Zip's survey, 32% named inflexible or slow processes as the single biggest factor limiting procurement's influence in their organization, well ahead of underinvestment in talent or technology (17%) and lack of strategic alignment (12%).

No amount of reward fixes a process that makes the compliant path harder than the alternative.

How to reduce maverick spend by making compliance easy

The companies that get high adoption without a standing enforcement regime share one trait. They make the compliant path the easiest path.

The easiest path shows up first, requires the fewest clicks, and answers the requester faster than going around the system would. A "correct" path that requires reading a wiki page first doesn't qualify.

Think about what that means in practice. A new hire in marketing doesn't want to violate procurement policy; they want a vendor approved so they can do their job. If the compliant route means finding the right form, learning who to loop in, and waiting a week for visibility into where the request even sits, a busy employee will find a faster way.

If the compliant route is the fastest way to get an answer, with visibility into status the moment they need it, there's no second path worth taking.

This is the actual difference between a stick, a carrot, and good design. Good design removes the wrong choice from consideration, because the path of least resistance is now the correct path.

One solution: Put procurement intake in Slack and Teams

The easier path is a question of location as much as speed.

Most employees aren't going to bookmark a procurement portal, and they shouldn't have to. They're already living in Microsoft Teams, Slack, email, or whatever their day-to-day tool is. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index research found the average employee receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a day.

Every time a request forces someone out of that tool and into a separate system they only open a few times a year, you've added a step. Those steps add up. Researchers writing in Harvard Business Review tracked 137 workers at three Fortune 500 companies and found they toggled between apps and websites nearly 1,200 times a day, losing about four hours a week to reorienting after each switch. Every added step is another moment where the side door starts to look faster.

The procurement processes that stick are the ones that show up inside the tools people never have to think twice about opening. If a request can start as a Teams message, or an approval can be confirmed in Slack, no one has to change their habits.

That puts the compliant path in front of their attention, a much easier ask than forcing them to adopt a new system entirely. It's the difference between a policy people tolerate and one they don't even know they're following.

How AI helps employees follow procurement policy

The one thing a Teams or Slack integration doesn't fix is that most people still don't know what the policy requires.

An AI layer sitting on top of that channel solves both problems at once. Instead of a form that assumes the requester already knows which fields to fill in, which approvers to loop in, and which vendor is already contracted, the employee has a conversation that does the work for them. "I need a new design tool for the marketing team" is enough. The AI asks the two or three questions that matter, checks whether an approved vendor already exists, and routes the request to the right approver, all inside the same message thread the person was already in.

That goes further than meeting people where they work.

The AI removes the moment where someone has to know the policy at all. The requester never needs to learn the approval matrix or which system holds the contract. The policy gets enforced inside a conversation that feels like asking a coworker for help, because the AI is doing the compliance work instead of asking the employee to do it.

The people who make and approve purchases already work this way. 62% of the leaders in Zip's survey use AI tools multiple times a day, and 89% say AI makes them more productive even after accounting for time spent reviewing and correcting its output. Someone who types a request into an assistant and gets an answer in seconds doesn't have much patience for a multi-page form with a dropdown for cost center and a separate approval workflow they have to track down manually. They'll treat a legacy intake form the way earlier generations treated a fax machine: technically functional, obviously outdated, and worth avoiding if there's any other option.

Most companies haven't caught up. 

Gallup's Q1 2026 workforce survey found AI's benefits so far show up mostly in individual tasks, and only about one in 10 employees at AI-adopting organizations strongly agree it has transformed how work gets done. Gallup reads that as a sign most organizations haven't redesigned workflows around AI. 

Procurement intake is one of the clearest places to start, because the policy can live inside the conversation and the employee never has to learn procurement as a separate skill.

Improving procurement adoption without a mandate

If you're leading procurement and waiting on an executive mandate to fix adoption, you might be waiting a long time. Mandates may change the leadership narrative, but they rarely change what an overwhelmed employee does at 4:45pm on a Friday when they need a vendor approved before a weekend deadline.

The pressure grows as companies get further with AI. 

In the State of AI in Spend, 66% of Builders (the organizations reporting clear, measurable ROI from AI investments in procurement technology) saw non-procurement teams increase direct purchasing over the past year, compared with 12% of Bystanders. The most AI-mature companies have the most buying happening outside procurement, so the compliant path has to work wherever that buying starts.

The better thing to ask is why anyone would choose not to use the compliant path. If the answer involves confusion, multiple systems, or radio silence while a request sits in someone's queue, that's a process problem, and it's fixable without a single new mandate.

The companies that solve procurement adoption stop treating it as a compliance campaign and start treating it as a product UX problem. The easiest experience and the right outcome become the same thing, and an AI layer enforces the rules instead of a policy wiki.

For more on how procurement, finance, and IT leaders are using AI in spend today, download Zip's State of AI in Spend report.