POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS article
Front. Sustain.
Sec. Sustainable Supply Chain Management
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsus.2025.1603214
Leveraging AI for Sustainable Public Procurement: Opportunities and Challenges
Provisionally accepted
- 1The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
- 2Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington, DC, United States
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Even though sustainable public procurement is critical to achieving global climate goals, most public organizations struggle to implement it. While artificial intelligence holds promise for addressing these challenges, its use in the public sector remains limited and often confined to discrete stages of the procurement lifecycle. This paper critically examines artificial intelligence’s potential to support sustainable public procurement across the full procurement lifecycle—from defining needs and assessing markets to issuing tenders, evaluating suppliers, and refining practices. Further, we examine the limitations and challenges posed by artificial intelligence technology for public procurement managers, recognizing concerns related to transparency, fairness, governance, and the impacts of artificial intelligence-driven decisions on market competition. Drawing on numerous examples in the practice, our findings show that artificial intelligence can be a powerful bridge between high-level sustainability aspirations and practical implementation, offering procurement officials the ability to access, interpret, and apply vast amounts of sustainability information across the entire procurement lifecycle. Our results provide understanding necessary to leverage artificial intelligence towards advancing sustainability across the entire procurement lifecycle, while highlighting the need for transparent, data-rich systems and collaborative engagement among technical experts, procurement professionals, and compliance and sustainability specialists. This analysis offers actionable insights into how AI can transform sustainable public procurement from aspiration to operational reality, enabling the public sector to use its considerable purchasing power to contribute meaningfully to global climate action.
Keywords: Sustainable public procurement, Artificia lintelligence, Public procurement, sustainability, innovation
Received: 31 Mar 2025; Accepted: 11 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Andhov, Darnall and Andhov. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Marta Andhov, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.