New Coupa research highlights a widening gap between industry leaders and laggards, underscoring the urgent need to modernize direct procurement using AI

FOSTER CITY, Calif., April 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The recently released report, State of Direct Spend 2026, from Coupa, the leading platform for autonomous spend management, reveals that direct procurement-related disruptions cost organizations an average of $16 million annually – with nearly every respondent experiencing significant supply disruptions within the last 24 months.

These staggering costs arrive as direct procurement reaches a critical inflection point. While 39% of organizations still view the function as a basic operational necessity, 72% expect it to evolve into a strategic contributor or a competitive advantage within three years. However, alleviating potential costs and maintaining agility requires overcoming massive internal hurdles. Respondents cited legacy systems (58%), data quality and fragmentation (51%), and integration complexity (42%) as the primary barriers to modernization.

The research identified a severe and widening capability gap between procurement "Leaders" and "Laggards", with Leaders demonstrating early adoption of AI-driven technologies in helping to solve issues:

• 60% of Leaders can detect supplier reliability and price risk early, compared to just 26% of Laggards.
• Laggards are 2.4x more likely to lose revenue due to fulfillment failures.
• 53% of Leaders are piloting, scaling, or running AI in procurement, whereas 64% of Laggards are still just exploring use cases or have not started at all.

By industry sector, the Industrial Machinery sector is seeing the highest operational risk, with 63% experiencing unplanned production shutdowns. Yet it is also the least prepared for cascade failures, with only 32% conducting quarterly scenario modeling or continuous optimization with AI digital twins. In contrast, the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) sector leads in sourcing sophistication – with over half of respondents operating at a Level 3 sourcing maturity or above. The Freight & Logistics sector is operationally the most resilient, but structurally constrained by legacy systems – 60% cite legacy systems as their #1 modernization barrier, more than any other sector surveyed.

"The survey data is clear – better management of direct spend and its processes can either significantly contribute to, or hinder, corporate growth. The good news is that Coupa is helping many customers address this issue by unifying direct and indirect spend data, and embedding intelligence into continuous decision-making workflows, transforming procurement from a tactical cost-center into a proactive driver of strategic enterprise growth," said Vikram Pathak, Coupa Chief Product Officer, Direct Spend. "Coupa helps organizations unify and align their supply chain, finance, and procurement operations from design to payments, enabling them to build more adaptive supply chains, intelligently manage total spend and supply, and protect and grow their margins."

Download the full State of Direct Spend report here.

Methodology
Incisiv surveyed 133 senior leaders across the CPG, Freight & Logistics, and Industrial Machinery sectors in North America and EMEA.

About Coupa
Coupa is the leading platform for autonomous spend management. Using its trusted, community-generated, $9.5 trillion dataset, Coupa brings evidence-based intelligence and autonomous AI agents to a network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers on a unified platform. Coupa seamlessly automates the purchasing and transaction process for buyers and suppliers alike, powering the #1 business trade network. With Coupa, you'll make margins multiply™. Learn more at coupa.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).

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SOURCE Coupa Software