Jenevieve King is a Sales Director at Tonkean and a member of the Forbes Business Council. This article originally appeared on Forbes. To see the original version, click here.
Artificial intelligence (AI)—and specifically generative AI—has proven the most breathlessly hyped technology ever to hit the procurement function. Its promise, when it burst onto the scene, transcended technology. It was trumpeted as something like magic.
Well, the hype hasn’t died down. In some ways, it’s only gotten worse. We’ve spoken with procurement leaders recently who report they’ve been fielding mandates from the c-suite to invest in certain new procurement tools simply because they include “AI” in their name.
Generative AI’s potential is meaningful, of course, even potentially transformative. Deployed strategically, at the process level, its promise is to repurpose procurement teams from transactional silos to strategic business partners, engaged by employees early on in buying cycles, valued by company leadership for the unique skills and perspectives only procurement teams can bring to bear.
But heralding AI itself as salvific unto itself almost guaranteed Procurement wouldn’t be able to harness the technology effectively, at least not right away.
So a correction is due. Here’s the truth about AI-powered tools:
These technologies are not meant to be magical substitutes for your people or even your existing technology investments—least of all the ERP and P2P platforms on which procurement depends, such as Oracle, SAP, or Coupa. Rather, their true revolutionary promise resides in their ability to empower organizations to get more out of those existing investments: to leverage them more seamlessly and effectively in concert with one another. That is, these technologies are powerful force multipliers—not replacements for your systems of record.
Key is implementing AI at the process level, via process orchestration software—in our view the essential infrastructure for getting real, at-scale business value out of innovative technology, AI included. (More on that below.)
The results—cutting cycle times in half, achieving nearly 100% internal process adoption, elevating procurement as a strategic business partner inside the organization—can be game-changing. We know this because we’ve seen it happen.
But even with an appropriately tempered understanding and expectation of AI—even with process orchestration set up as a delivery mechanism—getting started with it can feel intimidating. What’s the speed-to-implementation like? Where do you even start? We’ve been getting these questions a lot recently, so we decided to create a short guide.
To start, let’s define exactly what we mean by “process orchestration” and why we keep bringing it up. Think of process orchestration as your organization’s piping for better technology use: for automating tasks, collecting better data, and, eventually, leveraging AI.
AI-powered process orchestration empowers procurement teams to build process experiences that can anticipate employees’ needs, guide them through requests, unify processes that span many different systems and departments, provide intelligent support anywhere along those processes, and automate manual steps. It allows internal service teams like procurement to create and manage guided intake processes that are simplified, personalized, context-aware, highly intelligent, and that can be initiated through channels where requesters already spend their time: email, Microsoft Teams, etc.
Getting started with this technology need not be intimidating, in part because it’s not actually that difficult.
Here’s where to start.
A common challenge among internal service teams in process design is compensating for the fragmentation of systems across organizations. This is likewise an issue in getting business value out of AI at scale—beyond individuals leveraging it to write blog posts, for example.
In most organizations, disparate platforms like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) tools, and Contract Management systems (CRMS) operate in silos. Such fragmentation inculcates inefficiency, hinders performance, and creates damaging employee experiences.
You know the type of experiences we’re talking about—employees not knowing where or how to kick off even simple intake requests, employees having to log into complicated ERP systems that weren’t designed for them, procurement having to manually triage half a dozen different intake channels, employees not knowing where to go for help, procurement having to manually pester managers for follow-ups, nobody knowing the status of anything… etc. etc.
You need, in effect, better piping, through which data and work can be effortlessly passed, collaboration more seamlessly facilitated, and innovative capabilities more intelligently surfaced—and that’s where process orchestration comes into play.
The best and most enterprise-grade process orchestration technology will:
Speaking of AI…
Introducing AI into an organization is not just about giving employees access to the technology; it's about making that technology accessible to employees when they need it most.
AI becomes actually valuable when it’s surfaced at strategic points in any given procurement process.
What does it look like to surface AI to employees strategically?
It looks like identifying those areas where there has traditionally been friction, confusion, or difficulty, and leveraging AI to remove those barriers. This could be the challenge of getting started with a request, interpreting specialized terminology, or simply not knowing where to go to have a need met.
This was the thinking behind our Enterprise Copilot, an internal AI that allows process designers to extend to employees many different intelligent functionalities throughout the lifecycle of any given internal request. A few key examples:
These are all just starting points, but processes that provide access to such AI capabilities can quickly lead to revolutionary results. Eliminating the need for context-switching and change management ends up delighting employees and boosting process adoption—which has all kinds of crucial downstream impacts on compliance, performance, and efficiency. Increased efficiency and improved performance—resolving internal requests faster and more effectively with in-workflow AI and cross-system orchestration—translates into more consistent business value.
There’s much more to be done with AI internally. For example, behind the scenes, processes such as those described above will start collecting—and centralizing—all kinds of insights and data points, and you can use AI to take action on those.
But that’s for another blog post. Here, we want to give you just the building blocks. And the building block we’ll end on, for now, though intangible, is perhaps the most important.
Never forget the point of any innovative technology, AI very much included. It’s not to replace people or even legacy systems. It’s to augment us, and empower us to use our existing tools more intelligently.
On a personal level, AI enables employees to focus more completely on higher-value tasks. It can do so because it can make following internal processes much easier. Instead of spending an hour collaborating with Legal on creating an NDA, or figuring out how to properly buy a replacement part, or manually going back and forth with other stakeholders on approvals, employees and managers can leverage your more intelligently designed internal processes to conduct administrative work more rapidly and easily—which frees up all kinds of bandwidth. Both for them to get back to the work for which they’re uniquely suited, as well as for you to do the same.
But this is dependent on whether your organization seeks to use AI in this way. If you think of AI as a replacement for humans or technology, or as a silver bullet that’ll start magically creating business value on its own, you’re in for a bad time.
Dwight Jacobs, Chief Procurement Officer at Duke Energy Corporation, emphasized the point in a recent episode of Modern Business Operations. “You can’t take the human out of the equation,” he said. This is a crucial point.
Procedurally, this is often referred to as keeping a human in the loop. AI is incredibly efficient at gathering data, identifying trends, and making recommendations, but human oversight is essential for interpreting that data, making final decisions, and jumping into processes and conversations whenever human collaboration is required, which it often is.
As Jacobs put it, “We’re on this journey together. Most employees would like to take some routine tasks off their desk so they can focus on the more complex, judgmental things that give them more reward at the end of the day. But we’ve got to learn how to use it. We can’t decouple it from the human aspect. We can’t have the machine doing all the thinking. You can have it do the research, but there needs to be a human between that research and what you tell a supplier, or what you tell a customer.”
AI sounds really smart, in other words, but it doesn’t think. And you shouldn’t let it do your thinking for you.
There’s also something more philosophical about this too, though. AI has the potential to revolutionize enterprise procurement, but only if organizations implement it strategically. Part of implementing it strategically means implementing it empathetically. That is, AI and AI-powered process automation need to empower humans. It should do so by making our working lives more enjoyable—and our working selves more effective.
That’s the goal that should inform every AI initiative. That’s what’ll really enable you to create business value at scale.
Want to learn more about how Tonkean can help you leverage AI? Let's chat.
