2024 was a watershed year in the world of procurement. Emergent technology categories—orchestration, AI-powered “agents” and copilots—swept the function. Shifts in geopolitics skewed risk-management strategies (and created new opportunities for procurement to demonstrate unique business value). And procurement teams the world over learned crucial lessons about the sustaining strategic importance of continuing to invest not only in new tech, but in people.
From where we’re sitting, the most notable story from 2024 in procurement centers around the continued rise of AI-powered process orchestration, the strategy of coordinating automated business processes across teams and existing, integrated systems. Process orchestration provides internal service teams like procurement, IT, and legal a means of better leveraging, optimizing, and managing their organization’s unique mix of people, processes, and technology investments—including both ERP and P2P platforms as well as AI.
Still, 2024 was not only about technology. So much happened, in fact, that it can be hard to put it all in perspective. What mattered? What will continue to matter, heading into 2025?
To help answer these questions, we reached out to some of procurement’s most influential and attuned insiders, editors, and executives to hear more about what they feel were the most important stories and trends from the past year—along with what they have their eyes on heading into 2025. Here’s the 2024 procurement year in review.
The world changed in 2024. That’s true of most years, but 2024 feels especially noteworthy. A historic election in the US and wars in Europe and the Middle East, among other things, destabilized established ways of doing things both in procurement (with disruptions to supply chains, for example, plus the specter of tariffs) and beyond. According to Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner, co-founders of Art of Procurement, this has introduced new amounts of risk to the enterprise, but created certain opportunities, as well.
“Without question, the most notable event in 2024 from a procurement and supply chain perspective was the U.S. Presidential election,” Barner said. “Companies and decision-makers across the globe will spend the first part of 2025 adjusting strategies and re-running predictive scenarios to ensure that their tactics remain optimal with increased use of tariffs, lower corporate tax rates, and changes to the cost and availability of energy.”
Thanks to advances in procurement technology, like orchestration and AI, these changes could deliver procurement teams new opportunities to demonstrate their value.
“Geopolitical instability will create more opportunities for procurement and supply chain leaders to demonstrate their value in 2025, and further position procurement as risk managers and mitigators,” said Ideson. “This will be done in an environment where procurement technology such as intake, orchestration, and autonomous sourcing is finally allowing stakeholders to manage the majority of purchases themselves (but with the invisible oversight of the procurement team). Procurement leaders who embrace these new opportunities will see their relevance advance to new heights. Those that don’t may have change pushed upon them from above, putting them at risk for a future where the activities they performed can be fully automated or devolved back into the business.”
(We co-hosted a webinar with AOP and The Hackett Group all about embracing such opportunities with smart technology use earlier this year. Check it out below.)
12 months ago, procurement’s leading voices were aligned in their predictions that 2024 was going to be the year of process orchestration. Dr. Elouise Epstein centered it in her annual Spider Map of procurement providers. Spend Matters launched their first-ever RFI dedicated to the category. Gartner included orchestration as a category for procurement in their annual Hype Cycle report for the first time. Last January, Daniel Barnes at World of Procurement wrote: “Why Procurement Process Orchestration is Going to be Big in 2024”
Of course, here at Tonkean, we’ve been fine-tuning our intake and process orchestration technology since 2015. It was in 2022 that we published the first edition of Process Orchestration 101, the most comprehensive breakdown of the technology category available today. We updated it for the second time this fall.
(We’ve also focused on clarifying what process orchestration actually is and requires vs. what it isn’t. For example, true orchestration means being able to orchestrate automated workflows and process experiences across all your organization’s disparate teams, data sources, and systems. Funneling everything inside one additional siloed system is just a different version of the same problem.)
But certainly, we felt the growing excitement about process orchestration all year long. This is partly because our customers and partners—from Coupa to Workday to SAP—have gotten so excited about it. As Alejandro Fernandez, Global Head of Procurement at Semrush, told us, “It's been an amazing year of transformation for us at Semrush with the deployment of Tonkean’s process orchestration technology and the reengineering of our P2P processes. We have dramatically reduced our turnaround time for contracts and POs, replaced our clunky legacy ERP interface with Tonkean's friendly UI, and have streamlined how we handle requests coming from hundreds of users across the globe.”
You could feel the momentum externally, as well. Over the summer, we released the Tonkean Enterprise Copilot—an advanced set of orchestration and AI capabilities designed to help internal teams better anticipate employees’ needs, guide employees through requests, unify processes that span many different systems and departments, and automate manual steps—and the response was incredible.
More recently, we partnered with Beroe, a global leader in procurement decision intelligence, to launch Market Intelligence-Infused Orchestration, which brings real-time, actionable category and supplier intelligence directly into procurement workflows, starting from the earliest stages of intake—empowering enterprises to make more cost-effective, compliant sourcing decisions and proactively manage supply chain risk. Once again, the response was incredible. As Aaron McMillan, editor of Procurement Magazine, wrote about the release, “I may stick my neck out early and say 2025 is going to be the year of Procurement Orchestration.”
All this contributed to broader shifts in thinking across procurement. As James Meads, founder of Procurement Software, put it, “The biggest trends I see in procurement tech are the ongoing growth of intake and process orchestration tools. Then you've also got the exciting new wave of AI co-pilot assistants for handling routine and transactional tasks; those which aren't suited to robotic process automation (RPA) in workflows.”
One thing that excites us about process orchestration technology is the way it enables internal teams like procurement to tangibly leverage innovative technologies like AI at scale.
As Tonkean Sales Director Jenevieve King wrote earlier this year, process orchestration is the “essential infrastructure for getting real, at-scale business value out of innovative technology, like AI.” (King suggests we think of process orchestration as your organization’s “piping for better technology use.”)
But the potential returns of making real use of AI—in particular Gen AI and AI agents—remain tantalizing. Many in procurement still believe that such returns could be transformational, and that if in 2024 we only began to scratch the surface so far as to what these tools can do, 2025 will be the year we find out in earnest.
“Looking ahead to 2025, I expect generative AI to continue to shake procurement and beyond,” said Sean Galea-Pace, Deputy Editor of CPOStrategy. “As the technology matures, it has the potential to deliver unprecedented time and cost savings.”
"The AI Era is accelerating with agents and agentic workflows set to redefine the procurement workplace,” said Lance Younger, CEO of ProcureTech.
For as much excitement as there is about the future potential of AI, however, 2024 was perhaps even more so the year that procurement professionals reacquainted themselves with the whole point of investing in new technology like AI in the first place: empowering the people you employ to do great and better things.
“Success comes from kind people, passionately working together,” said Nico Bac, founder of Digital Procurement Now. “This is generally true in all environments but especially when it comes to the digital transformation of procurement.”
“Last year we realized that AI wasn't the panacea that some expected,” said Rich Sains, founder of Acada and host of The Procurement Conversation. “Teams still have many other priorities and not all are well positioned to take advantage of new technologies.”
“2024 was the year AI hit the "plateau of inflated expectations" in procurement,” said Joël Collin-Demers, Consulting Principal at Pure Procurement. “While you can do powerful things with AI, you still need good fundamentals (data, processes, business rules, system architecture) to get the most out of it.”
According to folks like Sains, none of the above should distract procurement leaders from the fact that, heading into 2025, “There is still much to do to raise procurement up to be a strategic business discipline.”
What should procurement teams be focusing on as they go about this work? It’s clear that the newly powerful tools at our disposal—from AI-powered process orchestration platforms to AI-powered agents and so on—will give procurement teams new amounts of technological firepower.
It’s also clear, however, that merely enjoying access to powerful technology is not enough, and that focusing on technology as an end unto itself, as opposed to a means of empowering people, can prove unproductive.
We predict that the procurement teams who approach their technology use so strategically will be the ones who seize the opportunities that 2025 is likely to present.
Want to learn more about using technology smarter in 2025? Start here.
