Walmart uses Pactum's AI chatbot to negotiate with thousands of smaller suppliers simultaneously. Not the top 50 strategic partners that get dedicated category managers. The long tail — the hundreds or thousands of vendors who normally get a purchase order with fixed terms and zero conversation.
The results are striking. And they challenge a lot of assumptions procurement people have about AI in supplier relationships.
The numbers
These numbers come from multiple sources. The Walmart/Pactum data is cited by Deloitte in their Global CPO Survey context. The 90% ease-of-use figure comes from independent deployments. Nibble Technology reports their 85% preference rate across over a million negotiations.
The pattern is consistent across all of them.
Why suppliers actually prefer a bot
The knee-jerk reaction is disbelief. Why would a supplier prefer talking to a machine? The answer becomes obvious once you stop thinking about your top 20 suppliers and start thinking about the other 80%.
For a smaller vendor, the typical experience with a large buyer looks like this: you receive a purchase order with fixed terms. You accept it or you don't. There is no discussion. No room to push back on payment terms. No one to call about volume commitments. No buyer has time for you because you are not in their top tier.
Suppliers don't dislike negotiation. They dislike being ignored.
Then an AI chatbot shows up. It is available 24/7. It has no ego. It does not play power games. It follows clear rules. And suddenly, the supplier has a real conversation for the first time — about payment terms, delivery schedules, volume discounts, contract length.
The bot is not trying to squeeze them. It is trying to find a deal that works for both sides, within parameters set by the procurement team. For many suppliers, this is a significant upgrade from the previous experience of being completely ignored.
The engagement gap
This is the part most procurement leaders miss. The bottleneck was never the supplier's willingness to negotiate. It was our capacity to talk to them.
A typical procurement team manages hundreds, sometimes thousands of suppliers. Even with the best intentions, the team's bandwidth only covers the top 10-20% by spend. Everyone else gets standardised terms and automated POs.
AI does not replace the strategic conversations procurement has with key suppliers. It fills the gap below that — the hundreds of relationships where no conversation was happening at all.
What this means for procurement teams
If you are still thinking about AI negotiation as "squeezing vendors automatically," you are missing the point. The data tells a different story:
- Suppliers welcome it — because it gives them a voice they did not have before
- Deal rates are high — 68% reached agreement, which is better than most manual outreach campaigns
- Satisfaction is genuine — 90% positive ratings are not the result of coercion
- It scales — one bot can handle thousands of simultaneous negotiations that no team could
The practical implication: AI negotiation works best not as a replacement for your strategic supplier conversations, but as a way to finally have conversations with the suppliers you never had time for.
The bottom line
Three out of four suppliers prefer negotiating with an AI. Not because the AI is better at negotiation than a human. Because the alternative, for most of them, was no negotiation at all.
The question is not whether suppliers will accept AI negotiation. They already have. The question is whether your procurement team is ready to use it — and whether you understand that the value is in engagement, not just savings.