Published: 9/3/2021
Last updated: 3/11/2025
The enterprise is in the midst of an ongoing software renaissance. It’s powered by AI, automation, and a renewed excitement about what sort of large-scale problems software can be employed to solve.
Many enterprise employees, however, aren't feeling the potential. They still spend too much of their time hacking through manual work: jumping between tabs, filling out forms, chasing stakeholders, and logging in and out of other teams’ preferred systems. To properly kick off simple things like intake requests, for example, employees still have to log in to large P2P or ERP platforms that they aren’t comfortable with, hunt around for information they don’t have easy access to, and manually collaborate with stakeholders outside the initial workflow. If you remember the first time you went clicking around SAP, you have some sense of how your employees feel.
Internal service teams, meanwhile—the folks who are supposed to be driving change—remain stuck facilitating processes that are too slow and too manual. This has downstream impacts. Where internal service teams like procurement and legal strive to be proactive—brought into buying experiences early enough to add unique value, for example—they’re forced instead to be reactive. Where they work toward strategic initiatives, they find themselves spending all their time on lower impact manual work. This translates directly into things like increased cycle times—requests simply take longer on average to complete—lower process adoption, and deleterious user experiences… all of which hurts your internal team’s potential utility as a business partner and value driver. Why give procurement or legal a seat at the table if the functions are mere encumbrances?
Then there's the question of AI and other new and exciting enterprise technologies coming online. Another thing internal enterprise teams are tasked with doing is strategically instrumenting such innovative tools into their mission-critical processes, such that employees can begin to benefit from them systematically and at scale. But for too many enterprise teams, the best they've been able to do is provide employees chatbots that can only do thins like help users navigate siloed UIs and policy documents.
So there are many moving parts to this broader challenge that every single enterprise is today facing: how to make better, more efficient use of our technology and data, such that our processes and operations serve to empower our humans and increase their capacity, rather than drain their energy?
The answer to that challenge is process orchestration.
Process orchestration refers to the strategy of coordinating automated business processes across teams and existing, integrated systems. AI-powered process orchestration software provides internal service teams like procurement, IT, and legal a means of better leveraging their organization’s unique mix of people, data, and tools—including automation tools, ERP platforms like SAP, and AI agents—at the process level. The result is your technology finally begins to truly work for your people, rather than continuing to force your people to work for your technology.
Process orchestration platforms effectively sit above and connect across your organization’s technology stack and org chart. (Quality process orchestration platforms absolutely must be able to integrate with every technology and data system your organization might use.)
One way to think of process orchestration is as a tool for the conductor of your company’s operational orchestra. That conductor doesn’t actually play the instruments, but they make sure the right instruments are being played at the right times.
Process orchestration technology allows you to create and orchestrate processes that can meet stakeholders in the technology environments they already spend time in—tools like Slack, email, and Teams, sure, but also the P2P and CRM suites where power users spend their time—as well as automate all the handoffs, triggers, and approvals required to resolve things like requests across departments and systems.
Process orchestration platforms also allow you to strategically surface for employees innovative capabilities and tools—such as AI agents—when and where they need them, at the process level.
It puts you in control of your technology and of your data and allows you to automate complex processes and empower your people without restriction.
There are a few different pieces to the process orchestration puzzle. Recently Tonkean co-founder and CEO Sagi Eliyahu broke them down:
"The simplest way to think about it is to start with the process and what goes into a great process.
Orchestration is about incorporating the systems, the people, and tools like automation and AI into one process. Orchestration doesn't JUST focus on synchronizing the data. It doesn't JUST focus on automating tasks. It doesn't JUST focus on providing employees access to AI. It's about bringing all these pieces of the puzzle together in one experience.
Solving only one piece of this puzzle is never going to unlock value. Connecting data sources or automating tasks will not free yourself or your team to focus on other things that are more important. You need to bring all the pieces together."
Ultimately, process orchestration platforms allow you to orchestrate and optimize workflows that involve many steps across all your organization’s technological and human components in a way that extends the capacity of existing tools, connects formerly siloed technological environments, and empowers those humans to focus on high-value work for which they’re uniquely qualified.
Central to the value-add of process orchestration platforms is their ability to help you always strategically embed the most innovative and powerful technology into your business operations and key internal processes.
The most innovative and powerful technology of our current moment is AI, and the most promising enterprise application of AI at the moment are AI agents.
Tonkean helps enterprise organizations leverage AI agents through our Agentic Orchestration capabilities.
Agentic Orchestration is process orchestration extended to include agents. It's how you instrument AI agents for enterprise. It’s an approach that puts agents alongside employees and empowers them to coordinate workflows, execute tasks, and drive outcomes—all while following configurable policies and guardrails.
Agents can operate alone or in collaboration with other relevant agents in a multi-agent architecture and run both as a chat interface and independently in the background. The multi-agent architecture enables companies to distribute the deployment and administration of specialized enterprise agents throughout the organization, putting control into the hands of the people with the right subject-matter expertise and authority.
Just like any other new technology, for AI agents to be truly useful to an enterprise, they must be easily accessible, able to execute work across your entire organization, and able to autonomously drive business outcomes—while always carefully following your organization’s policies.
Tonkean is the only Agentic Orchestration platform that delivers on all these points. And the reason is we've built our agents atop our process orchestration platform, which, thanks to how thoroughly it integrates with your organization's technology, policy, and data stack, allows you to make agents accessible to employees at strategic points in any process and across all your organization’s departments and tools.
AI-powered process orchestration must be able to accommodate all your employees' many different working preferences and styles—as well as extend to employees many different intelligent functionalities throughout the lifecycle of internal requests.
The experience, for end-users, can take a variety of forms:
What are the benefits of all this?
For employees, AI-powered process orchestration software effectively works behind the scenes doing everything they’ve long wanted AI and process automation to do for them—the bureaucratic, back-office busywork—so they can focus more completely on creating unique, strategic value that drives the business forward.
For internal service organizations, the ability to deliver such seamless experiences is only where the benefits begin.
Let’s take a real-world business example.
Semrush, providers of a popular digital marketing platform, needed a more efficient and seamless way to facilitate intake across their existing enterprise systems, including Oracle, Ironclad, and their various messaging tools.
They turned to Tonkean for help. The Semrush procurement team started leveraging Tonkean’s ability to connect with and orchestrate automated processes across their legacy systems. “Making sure that your P2P is natively talking to contract lifecycle management (CLM), that's just not something you can easily do and that's something that Tonkean is doing for us,” Alejandro Fernandez, Head of Global Procurement at Semrush, said.
The Results: The Semrush procurement team cut their cycle times in half—and now provides excellent internal experiences that meet employees where they are.
“There are many use cases now where Tonkean is really facilitating how our new process operates, even if you're jumping back and forth between tools,” Alejandro told us. “I think that has been one of the biggest achievements along with the fact that with the redesign and the deployment of all these new tools, we've taken our cycle time from 19 days to 10. We've dramatically reduced the time it takes to sift through all of these orders that are coming through via email, via Slack and other web forms. It's created all of that efficiency, allowing our teams to do more with a lot less. We're thrilled about having Tonkean in-house.”
Ready to learn more about what process orchestration can do for you? Check out our comprehensive guide, Process Orchestration 101, or sign up for a demo of Tonkean today.