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Originally published: 06/10/2024
Updated: 11/5/2025
Procurement is awash in new technology, but challenges remain. In fact, new challenges continue popping up as a direct result of this technological deluge.
Procurement processes have long been complex, but today they’re more complicated than ever. According to a survey of around 300 enterprise procurement senior practitioners conducted by Tonkean, the average procurement team manages around 15 separate applications. 97% of enterprise procurement teams use more than one ERP. Only 18% of procurement leaders say their tech stack is fully integrated.
Even simple intake processes often include many steps spread across siloed systems, meaning stakeholders must toggle between them to accurately submit or complete a request.
What’s the way forward? One answer: Procurement orchestration, powered by AI Agents.
“We are witnessing a critically important innovation happening right now,” wrote Dr. Epstein, Partner at Kearney and author of the famous procuretech spider map, in a LinkedIn post. “This has the potential to be the [proverbial] 1 app to rule them all... or at least the single smart interface to all the capabilities on the chart.”
“Process orchestration is the key to leveraging your existing technology investments more seamlessly and harmoniously, such that the process experiences you provide employees are unified, connected, and truly beneficial for them,” Tonkean Founder and CEO Sagi Eliyahu said in the Procurement Orchestration 2025 Champions Index published by CPO Strategy.
“I think we are at a time in the procurement space, and frankly in the technology space across the board, where these problems can be solved,” said Sheena Smith, Senior Vice President of Rise Now, a procurement and supply chain transformation company, in a webinar earlier this year. “We can solve almost anything with tech and orchestration at this point.”
Procurement orchestration refers to the strategy of coordinating automated business processes across teams and existing, integrated systems. Procurement orchestration platforms help enterprise procurement teams “orchestrate” their unique mix of people, data, and tools—including AI agents—at the process level.
Integral to orchestration is integration. Procurement orchestration platforms worth their salt will connect with—and allow you to orchestrate processes in and out of—every system your tool might use.
It’s in this way that procurement orchestration tools allow you to also accommodate employees' many different working preferences and styles, for example, by facilitating intake processes that employees can kick off in whatever application tools they already spend their time in. The ability to finally, operationally connect your various tools is also how you can begin to bridge the silos that typically separate working environments and that have long made procurement processes inefficient and complex.
The true promise of AI-powered procurement orchestration is to finally put internal shared service teams like procurement in charge of the tools they deploy while drastically cutting the time they spend on menial labor.
It solves, in other words, the problem that too much new technology has created within procurement.
It also allows procurement teams to finally, truly make their technology work for them and the employees they serve—as opposed to making people work for technology. No longer do stakeholders have to log in to your ERP or P2P platform to submit or approve intake requests. The technology will meet them wherever they are, whether it be Slack or email.
This has the corollary effect of empowering procurement to spend more of their own time focusing on creating new business value, as opposed to manually pestering employees to abide by prescribed procurement processes, or manually shepherding tasks to resolution.
This produces much in the way of tangible business value, including:
There’s much intangible benefit born of procurement orchestration, as well—in the way, for example, of improved relationships and happier employees. “Our relationship with the legal and compliance team has drastically improved” thanks to Tonkean, said Kevin Stacey, head of procurement at Cockroach Labs. “It’s now a trusted partnership. I think that’s been a huge benefit, and something I’m looking forward to is just allowing people to do what they’re hired to do, rather than having to focus on manual tasks.”
This manifold ROI that procurement teams get from investments in procurement orchestration goes a long way in explaining precisely why orchestration technology has become so popular inside enterprise procurement teams. Indeed, as editors at Procurement Magazine wrote last year, it’s already “transformed the industry.”
What we’ve seen so far, however, is likely to be far less transformative than what procurement orchestration makes possible when you factor in the rise and potential of AI agents.
Agentic orchestration is how you instrument AI agents for enterprise. It allows you to embed AI agents in orchestrated workflows, as well as deploy AI agents to complete complex work—guided by rules-based automation and human-managed guardrails—across teams and tools on your behalf.
Agentic procurement orchestration is a young technology. It’s also by far the most exciting application of AI technology procurement’s ever seen; as Gartner put it in its most recent Procurement Hype Cycle, AI agent use cases in procurement are “just emerging, but have vast potential… to transform traditional procurement functions.”
AI agents are powerful on their own. But in order to use them to the fullest of their transformative potential, you have to have a way to operationalize them across your organization.
Most procurement automation today happens inside individual systems. Agentic orchestration allows you to equip agents to complete work across systems.
“For AI agents to be truly useful to an enterprise, they must be easily accessible, able to execute work across your entire organisation, and able to autonomously drive business outcomes— while always carefully following your organisation’s policies,” says Eliyahu.
Agentic orchestration is the means by which you equip AI agents to go beyond mere chatbots to something more like networked colleagues—that is, intelligently, collaboratively, proactively, and autonomously.
This is how the best coding agents already operate. And it’s what orchestration makes possible for agents deployed in the back-office.
Using Tonkean’s fully integrated, enterprise-grade orchestration technology, for example—which in addition to connecting every tool and team inside your organization, allows you to set guardrails for what AI agents can and cannot do—your agents can take on and complete complex work across your organization on their own. Instead of waiting for human triggers, they can monitor data and events across systems (ERP, P2P, CLM, HRIS, etc.), identify when tasks should start, and autonomously move work forward.
In the long run, procurement teams can use agentic orchestration to deploy an unlimited number of proactive agents that execute complex workflows autonomously without waiting for your command—handling hundreds of contracts, thousands of invoices, and countless processes in parallel, while looping in humans only human input is required.
Finally, if your agentic orchestration platform comes with a no-code agent builder, your team will be able to build custom agents itself, no code required. Subject-matter experts know exactly which processes drain time and hide opportunity. An agent builder allows such users to fix those problems directly with agents.
One way to think about procurement orchestration is as a tool for the conductors of your company’s orchestra of tools, employees, agents, and data—a way to bring the noise and chaos of a hundred different component parts into harmony.
Another is as the essential infrastructure of procurement’s AI-powered age. It’s how you harness the raw power of your technology investments.
The procurement organizations who go on to realize the awesome transformative potential of those investments will not be those who simply accumulate the largest number of innovative tools, or even the largest number of agents.
Rather, it will be those organizations who work to use those tools and innovations strategically together.
Procurement orchestration is the means by which you do that. Its power lies in its potential for for putting structure around the enormous amounts of intelligence and computing power now at our disposal—and for ensuring our technology forevermore works for humans, rather than ever again forcing humans to waste time compensating for the limitations of our technology.
“Orchestration is about incorporating the systems, the people, and tools like automation and AI into one process,” we write in our flagship eBook on procurement orchestration, Process Orchestration 101. “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.”
Want to see what procurement orchestration can do for you? Learn more with Tonkean’s ProcurementWorks, the preeminent AI-powered process orchestration platform for procurement teams.
