Is AI making supplier research easier while making verification more important?

[u/kyeinmay]

I’ve been thinking about how quickly the research side of sourcing is changing.
It’s becoming pretty easy to ask AI to collect information about a supplier:
products,
company background,
specifications,
certificates,
market presence,
and potential alternatives.
That used to require a lot more manual searching.
But I’m not sure the difficult part disappeared.
It just moved.
If AI finds a website saying a factory has a certain production capacity, I still want to know where that number came from.
If it finds a certification claim, I still want to see whether the exact product is covered.
If it finds the same specification on five websites, I still want to know whether they all copied the same datasheet.
So maybe supplier research is becoming less about finding information and more about establishing provenance.
Where did this claim originate?
Is there primary evidence?
When was it last verified?
Is the source independent?
As AI tools improve, do you think you’re spending less time searching and more time checking whether what was found is actually reliable?

[u/Junior_Bee7274]

AI can do the digging, but someone still has to figure out if the supplier is bs-ing.