# Simon Frost

Simon Frost teaches practical procurement skills and writes about how technology and AI are changing supplier management, sourcing, and contract work.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/simon-frost/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-frost-a584582
- LinkedIn followers: 34,100
- Topics: artificial-intelligence
- Based on 19 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Simon Frost is useful for procurement training and commentary on AI agents, supplier management, and contracts.

- Best for: A procurement training or advisory company planning a co-branded webinar on AI and contracts.
- Not for: A consumer technology brand seeking short-form video creators for paid social product sales.
- Check first: Ask for recent comparable results and audience survey data on job role and seniority.

### Takeaways

- AI agents need permissions, data, and guardrails; people keep judgement, trust, and risk.
- Contract audits can recover hard cash, including unclaimed rebates and missed service penalties.
- Cost inflation should be met with specific levers and evidence, not blanket price acceptance.

## Main ideas

- **Treat AI agents as digital colleagues with permissions, data and guardrails**: Frost defines the difference between ordinary AI and an AI agent: ordinary AI answers a question, while an agent pursues a goal by planning, acting, checking, adapting, repeating and delivering a result. In procurement, agents can analyse spend, research markets, discover suppliers, prepare sourcing events, compare responses, create and monitor contracts, track performance, identify risks, support negotiations and create reports. The practical questions are what agents existing systems already provide, what to buy versus build, what context and permissions an agent needs, and where autonomy stops and human oversight starts. Frost warns that putting an agent on top of a broken process does not fix it.
- **Keep judgement, trust and risk with people even as AI takes on transactional work**: Across several posts, Frost repeats a simple split: AI automates, detects, calculates and predicts; people judge, trust, sense and decide. They apply it to strategy, meetings, product reviews, contracts, factory visits and crises. In contract management, AI can analyse, search, summarise, draft, monitor, automate and upload; people remain responsible for judgement, risk, relationships, negotiation and decisions. Frost argues that AI can help manage contracts but cannot replace an understanding of contract fundamentals. Without that understanding, people can sign away rights, misunderstand obligations, leave value on the table, expose the business to risk or lose a face-to-face negotiation.
- **Use contract audits to find hard cash, not just reduce legal risk**: Frost treats contract management as both a risk control and a value-recovery exercise. The audit method is to collate and catalogue contracts, then check end dates and commercial terms. Common failures include buying materials from weak suppliers without a signed contract, unfavourable direct and consequential loss clauses, contracts without SLAs, large companies losing contracts in emails, negotiations run by people without contract training, and unclaimed rebates. Frost also discusses when an SME should build a simple contract lifecycle tool versus buy proper CLM software, with a rough threshold of fewer than 20 contracts for the simple build. A separate co-created post with lawyer Miles Barnes, a partner at Howes Percival, explains termination clauses; it presents the view as co-created, not Frost's alone.
- **Attack cost inflation with specific levers and evidence, not blanket price acceptance**: Frost sets out nine levers for cost inflation: should-cost modelling, index price challenge, specification challenge, network optimisation, phased price increases, give-and-get trades, spot versus contract buying, packaging and order optimisation, and demand challenge. Fact-based negotiation reduces emotional hype; an index price is not the same as a supplier's actual buy price; specifications can often be relaxed when prices surge; larger batches can drive supplier efficiency if cash and storage allow; and spot buying probably should not exceed about 20% to cap upside risk.
- **Treat skills and human judgement as the durable career advantage in an AI-enabled market**: Frost argues that skills matter more than category knowledge because AI can close knowledge gaps quickly. A poll of their audience returned 81% for category management skills versus 19% for category knowledge. They list hard skills that AI increasingly assists with, including spend and data analytics, value-stream mapping, supplier assessment, cost modelling, strategic options and recommendations. Human skills become more valuable: stakeholder engagement, commercial judgement, communication, influencing, curiosity, storytelling, leadership, critical thinking and relationship building. Frost stresses the fundamentals: understanding principles, giving AI the right context, asking the right questions, challenging answers, spotting errors and applying judgement. A career post extends the argument from Mars in 2003 through analyst, junior buyer, senior buyer, manager and director roles, predicting that the old triangle becomes a diamond as AI reduces analyst and junior-buyer headcount and pushes managers toward broader commercial oversight. The 81/19 result is a poll of Frost's own audience, not a representative survey.
- **Make practical training accessible, not theory for its own sake**: Frost repeatedly promotes the Procurement Adventurer Academy as practical training rather than procurement theory for its own sake. The offer is ten modules over ten weeks, including contract management. They also mention a half-day contract-management masterclass. Access is a recurring priority: Frost offers regional discount codes for people outside Western Europe and North America where typical salary bands are lower, and describes a vision of world-class procurement training for everyone globally. The promotions follow substantive posts rather than replacing the teaching. The Academy dates differ across the posts; ask for the current schedule.

## Work to read

- [Agents aren't coming — they're already here](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-frost-a584582_agents-arent-coming-theyre-already-here-activity-7513470826482954240-7DdL)
- [How a contract audit recovered over £1M](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-frost-a584582_i-saved-a-client-1m-from-a-simple-contract-activity-7495729199966638080-1TzF)
- [Why contract fundamentals still matter in an AI world](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-frost-a584582_i-dont-care-how-good-ai-gets-procurement-activity-7510579398253662208-p2oe)
- [Skills trump Knowledge: poll result and why it matters](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-frost-a584582_you-voted-skills-trump-knowledge-81-vs-activity-7513108643341594625-zlii)
- [AI automates, humans judge: a clear split of labour](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-frost-a584582_ai-automates-detects-calculates-predicts-activity-7494996371666751488-MvDA)
- [The procurement career path is turning from a triangle into a diamond](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-frost-a584582_the-tech-ai-revolution-is-in-full-flight-activity-7512753597617635328-jtIt)
- [Nine practical levers to tackle cost inflation](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-frost-a584582_if-youre-faced-with-cost-inflation-here-activity-7493577061425410048-Nl_g)

## Brand relationships

- **Procurement Adventurer Academy** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Mars** (employment)
- **Howes Percival** (mention)
- **Digital Procurement World** (mention)

## Partnerships

Simon Frost’s posts document paid training products rather than a published sponsor programme. They sell cohort training through the Procurement Adventurer Academy, which they describe as ten modules delivered over ten weeks, with start dates announced in advance; September and February cohorts are named. The clearest collaboration pattern is placing a named outside specialist alongside the training: lawyer Miles Barnes is credited as co-author of a contract-termination post and described as leading the Academy’s contract-management module and a planned half-day masterclass. A buyer interested in thought leadership or a co-branded webinar should ask directly about rates, formats and partnership intake. Many posts end with an explicit request to repost and follow their LinkedIn account, part of the distribution a partner would inherit.

## Alternatives

- Michael Taylor: Choose Michael Taylor when the partnership targets contract compliance and value recovery, and the audience includes finance, accounts payable and shared-service teams as well as procurement. The posts make a specific, testable argument: compliance fails when contracts live in scattered inboxes and shared drives, so centralisation, obligation tracking at signature, standardised clause libraries and a named owner per contract are the structural fixes. Taylor describes an operating method a partner could co-present: an independent third party sits across procurement, AP and ERP to connect contract to invoice to payment. Rather than auditing everything at once, it tests rebates, payment terms, rate caps or pricing tiers across every contract and invoice. The posts offer an unusually concrete example for a name-search comparison. A national retailer ran more than 900 supplier agreements through contract review, found that over half its suppliers were paid earlier than the contract required and that terms ran 30 or more days shorter than peer benchmarks, and released $22M in working capital with $2.8M or more in interest savings. For a finance-focused webinar needing a contract-management segment with a quantified case, this is a stronger platform than teaching-first content: the argument comes with numbers and a repeatable audit design.
- Suzanne Hill: Choose Suzanne Hill when a campaign needs to answer the bigger strategic question rather than teach tooling: what is procurement actually for once AI reshapes the market it buys from. The posts draw that line cleanly. AI for procurement means using tools to execute existing tasks better, such as research, tender analysis, contract review, supplier assessment and spend analysis. Procurement for the AI era is different because the buying decision itself changes: not supplier A against supplier B, but buying technology, outsourcing a capability, partnering, building internally, procuring a managed service or buying the outcome, with questions about data and IP ownership, where risk sits and how dependent the business becomes on the provider. That frame would give a co-branded webinar its debate segment, and a partner could reuse the distinction in its own course materials. The second post adds a construction-specific market-intelligence argument: estimating, procurement and commercial teams sit on the boundary with the supply chain and are first to see new suppliers, delivery methods and technology vendors displacing traditional subcontractors, but that signal is never recorded systematically; AI can now read and connect that qualitative pattern across dozens of tenders. Hill also states a training offer focused on the second, strategic piece, which maps directly onto a training partner’s needs.
- Sam Jenks: Choose Sam Jenks when the partnership needs a convenor and community voice who attends practitioner events and reports what the field is saying. The posts are field reports rather than essays: takeaways from a procurement conference and a partner note from a spend-analytics event after the day’s talks. That format suits a partner seeking event-side co-branding, a conference recap or a panel moderator, and it gives the partner usable lines to quote. The reported points are specific and attributable: make the compliant way the easy way, because people will not follow a process that is harder than the shortcut; calculate the cost of inaction alongside ROI; embed supplier relationship management into the procurement process rather than treating it as a sideshow; dirty data makes AI investment worthless; supplier knowledge is the basis of resilience; procurement should own its spend, supplier, category and contract data; bring insights to users or adoption lags; and recognise that change management and user experience make or break a technology rollout. A webinar opening with what buyers in large-enterprise procurement are actually saying would gain real texture from these points, and the creator’s event presence is itself a distribution asset.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/