For the last year and a half, vendors, thought leaders, and industry analysts have done much proselytizing about the potential of process orchestration and AI in procurement.
What we’ve actually gotten out of AI and orchestration tools, however, are chatbots that help users navigate siloed UIs and policy documents. Or, AI that’s good at making movies and writing blogs and code, but not so good at doing the work we actually want AI to do for us—the bureaucratic, time-consuming busywork. And these tools haven’t moved the needle. Enterprise employees still spend too much of their time hacking through manual work—jumping between tabs, filling out forms, chasing stakeholders, and learning how to navigate other teams’ preferred systems.
Procurement processes, meanwhile, still proceed far too slowly and remain painfully complex. Despite the plethora of tools, technologies, and offerings designed for and now available to procurement teams, processes lag behind the businesses they support. To properly kick off intake requests, employees have to log in to large P2P platforms 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 any big ERP system, you have some sense of how your employees feel.
Where procurement strives to be proactive, they’re forced to be reactive, as they’re brought in too late to negotiate optimally. Where they work toward strategic initiatives, they find themselves doing low-impact manual work.
Especially in the critical intake phase, procurement doesn’t have the means to move fast enough.
There are a few reasons why, but the main one is this: modern, digital procurement processes are complex and employees don’t understand them. To facilitate processes, procurement must manually go back and forth with confused requesters, and then with approvers, then suppliers—all the while using suboptimal or incomplete information gathered from those confused requesters.
Several expensive business costs result:
We seem to be in the midst of a veritable software renaissance powered by AI and a renewed enthusiasm—not just about the breadth of the problems software can solve, but about what kinds of teams and people should have the capacity to wield those tools. (The core belief behind the power of no-code).
This is certainly the case in procurement, where there’s no shortage of offerings for the challenges faced by today’s procurement teams—things like rogue spend, lack of transparency, and low process adoption (to say nothing of supply chain disruptions and the challenges of the economic environment writ large).
But this underscores the problem. The preponderance of platforms fragments our working lives, which can create unintended challenges. In procurement’s case, processes are strung across supplier catalog and RFP tools, supplier relationship management, PO creation and approval tools, and AP automation. These are built on top of the core ERP and procurement tools offered by the likes of SAP and Coupa, too.
And on top of the procurement-focused systems are all the regular enterprise applications teams rely on to simply get work done: the messaging apps, knowledge management and file storage systems, project management apps, etc. So not only do you have to manage your procurement tools, but you have to manage those tools on top of the basic suite of apps your organization uses because—importantly—enterprise processes are inherently cross-functional. Simply put, it can be overwhelming.
Funnily enough, organizations don’t even know how many apps they have. When surveyed, enterprise leaders reported that their orgs use some 20 applications, but on average, large organizations use 211 applications and smaller companies use 69.
It’s no wonder employees are feeling overburdened.
AI and orchestration were supposed to solve all this—to help us simplify our working lives, spend less time on menial work, and use our existing tools better together.
Little of that has some to pass.
So, what do procurement teams need to truly address these problems and finally take real strides towards more efficiency and increased business value, higher process adoption and more operational agility? Towards cementing procurement’s rightful position as integral partners to the broader organization?
We’ve spent the last several years answering that question. Here’s where we’ve landed.
What, then, would AI and orchestration that puts all of the above together actually look like? Is it possible, or so much wishful thinking? Why should procurement teams demand as much?
We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these questions, and working through them internally too. And last month, we launched an evolution of Tonkean’s AI capabilities that we believe represents an answer.
It’s called the Tonkean Enterprise Copilot.
The Tonkean Enterprise Copilot is a transformative AI and advanced orchestration capability that works behind the scenes to do everything employees want AI 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.
We’ve been working on the copilot for years at this point. It builds on ProcurementWorks, our out-of-the-box offering for procurement teams, and the AI Front Door, the intelligent and proactive entry point for requesters.
We believe it’s the most powerful functionality ever made available to procurement teams.
Procurement teams seem to agree; the response to the Copilot release has been absolutely incredible—which we interpret as a testament to the simple fact that this is the sort of AI and orchestration tool the enterprise has been waiting for.
And for good reason. A few days after we launched the Enterprise Copilot, CPO Strategy published a webinar and case study about what Alejandro Fernandez, Head of Global Procurement at Semrush, has been able to accomplish with Tonkean’s AI-powered orchestration tools.
As Alejandro told us, “With the deployment of Tonkean’s 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."
You can watch and read Alejandro’s case study here, and read more about it below, in this month’s Procurement In the Field Feature.
Ultimately, however, the Enterprise Copilot is just an example of what we think truly valuable AI and orchestration tools should look like.
Why is that so?
It’s a matter of necessity, really. Rather than more specialized applications to solve yet another niche use case, what procurement teams need are central solutions that unify disparate systems and streamline workflows—AI and orchestration that tie together the apps you already have, orchestrate complex processes across them, and cultivate personalized, seamless, and guided process experiences. These experiences should be capable of helping employees more rapidly complete things like intake as well as accommodate the unique working preferences and styles of all stakeholders… rather than force employees to log into systems they don’t like, the process should meet them where they are.
This is the impact of a power tool for procurement: let the procurement team leverage powerful automation but radically simplify the process for requesters. In other words, provide power tools for power users and a great experience for everyone else.
The first thing you see happen when you give procurement teams this kind of capability is process adoption goes way up. If requesters are empowered to self-serve in a process that’s tailored to their needs, they will indeed follow that process.
There’s an interesting feedback loop we’ve seen when working with procurement teams: when you bring together the various systems, from the core procurement platform to the supplier catalog and PO creation app, etc., and create an experience that’s easy to follow, the process actually gets followed. And as employees follow the process, Procurement pulls more spend under management and drives efficiency. As the whole process becomes more efficient, procurement teams have more time to focus on improving that process and driving strategic initiatives, therefore making it easier for requesters, which further increases process adoption, and so on.
Workday, another client of ours, has used Tonkean to improve the experience so much for internal requesters that process adoption is “near 100%.” Kenny Trinh, who leads Workday’s Legal Automation Group, said that “Tonkean allows us to meet employees where they’re at, intelligently sort requests, and automate actions on them after they’ve come in.”
The Enterprise Copilot helps close the gap between what’s been promised to internal teams like procurement and what they truly need, which ultimately amounts to the ability to provide much more consistently effective, intelligent, and human-centric process experiences. What
Besides integration among the various systems involved in a process, what makes a good experience?
When all that’s present and is executed across all procurement processes at scale, it manifests in: accelerated cycle times, reduced human error, more bandwidth for impactful work, better process adoption, and more business value.
Too much new technology is addressing the wrong set of problems. Our CEO, Sagi Eliyahu, shared a great meme with me the other day that showed a person washing the dishes and saying “I wanted AI to do my dishes so I can do art and write, not for AI to do art and write while I’m here still doing the dishes.”
It cracked me up because it rang so incredibly true. I’ve always thought the great strength of a platform like Tonkean was to make tech do the crappy work so I can do the interesting work. What good is a slick, AI-powered intake form if I still have to explain to users the difference between a purchase order and a purchase requisition when they submit the wrong thing? Shouldn’t the AI answer that for them?
Well, the answer to that, we firmly believe, is yes. We also believe such functionality represents but a baseline. This is what all AI and orchestration tools will provide, in due time. Anything less represents a promise not kept.
Want to learn more about the future of AI and orchestration in procurement? Start here.
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