By Kate Jeter, Head of Global Field Marketing
Procurement orchestration is rapidly moving from a buzzword to a fully fledged operating model, and the recent CIPS webinar featuring ORO Labs’ Chris Vessey together with Editorial Director James Moore demonstrated why this approach is critical for procurement teams in an increasingly AI-driven environment.
Many working outside of procurement picture the function as a neat, linear source-to-pay process: materials and services are sourced, risk is assessed, contracts are drafted, suppliers onboarded, orders are made, invoices issued, payments transferred. In theory, there is a seamless flow, underpinned by a qualified team and clear user journey. In reality, as Vessey outlined, the process looks more like a tangled web of exceptions, side-flows, and parallel systems that users frequently struggle to navigate.
That complexity isn’t accidental, but rather is a byproduct of procurement’s importance and years spent “controlling” risk by adding approvals and rigid policies. The result has been poor adoption, compliance gaps, and most critically, bad data that undermines everything from savings delivery to AI initiatives. “Procurement is ultimately all about driving decisions,” Vessey noted, “and the emerging technologies we now start to see, especially surrounding artificial intelligence, are founded on quality data.”
Many CPOs feel that they have already done “digital transformation” through suite implementations and integrations. Vessey drew a sharp distinction between that word and orchestration. Integration, he said, “is about connecting systems,” while “orchestration is about connecting outcomes and decisions.”
Closed, “walled-garden” suites tend to be:
-Rigid in how processes and data are structured
-Fragmented, with multiple point solutions cobbled together
-Built on an assumption of perfect, unrealistic master data
-Experienced by users as a confusing, multi-tool journey
Orchestration in contrast places a layer over the existing tech stack that:
-Gives users a single “front door” guiding them on the correct path
-Connects and reuses data across processes rather than forced re-keying
-Focuses design on the end-to-end experience and desired outcome
As Vessey highlighted, “workflow tools don’t understand the business that they live in,” whereas a procurement-specific orchestration layer “is powered by intelligence, not just workflow,” and understands concepts including vendors, hierarchies, payees, and risk semantics directly out of the box.
A recurring theme in the discussion was shifting from a policing mode to one of enablement. Traditional procurement has relied on rigid rules and approvals to manage control, “the best way we knew to control things was just to add another approval in,” but that approach drives users away and degrades data.
Vessey argued for reframing procurement’s mandate as “speed and safety,” enabling the business to move faster while strengthening resilience and compliance, rather than slowing it down. That requires putting people back into the center. “This is not about having machines in the loop and humans just posting things between different applications,” he said. “It’s really about people being empowered to lead,” whether they are end users, procurement professionals, or suppliers.
The practical implication: procurement should want non-procurement users to spend “as little time as possible in the procurement process,” while still doing the right thing. That means building experiences that feel intuitive, even “hyper-personalized,” and assume users want to be compliant if you make the right path an easy one.
Asked where orchestration delivers the biggest impact, Vessey’s answer was clear: start with intake. “The best place to start is often with intake,” he said. “It does make a big difference to be able to say to all of your users, look, just come to this one front door, and this front door will guide you to where you need to go.”
From there, organizations can:
-Use basic and generative AI to interpret requests and route users
-Gradually mature downstream workflows (sourcing, invoicing, approvals)
-Consolidate approvals in channels like Teams or Slack rather than email
Critically, intake isn’t the finish line, “You can’t just stop with intake,” Vessey warned. Many teams have tried simple “front door” solutions over the last 20 years; without true orchestration behind them, those efforts rarely stick.
He highlighted sourcing-to-contracting and supplier onboarding as particularly rich use cases once foundational intake is in place, as they rely on collaboration across legal, technology, risk, the business, and suppliers, and today are usually supported by fragmented tools and a reliance on spreadsheets.
The topic of Agentic AI continues to dominate the conversation in the procurement technology landscape and Vessey framed the evolution as moving from AI (understanding data) to generative AI (creating new content), to agents that can “go out and do the exploration,” and act. “We may be the last generation to ever have a wholly human team,” he suggested, arguing that future teams will be composed of people and agents working together under shared governance.
In practice ORO is already seeing agents:
-Reviewing thousands of purchase requisitions a month to check fields, commodities, and ERP combinations, and triggering fixes or escalations where needed
-Reading supplier quotes, comparing them to historical data, flagging anomalies, and even testing autonomous negotiation in controlled pilots
-Managing supplier onboarding flows and updating direct-material prices in ERP based on expiry and new quotes, saving “multiple, multiple hours” of manual work
“An agent is just like a human being,” Vessey said. “It has an intake, a process it goes through, intelligence it supplies, an escalation path, and an output - all of which you can control.” The goal is not to replace people, but to remove repetitive, non-value-add tasks so practitioners can focus on higher value activities like supplier strategy, stakeholder engagement, and scenario planning.
Underpinning all of this is data. Orchestration strengthens procurement’s data foundation by capturing information once and reusing it seamlessly across sourcing, risk, contracting, and payables. It normalizes and structures that data using procurement-specific semantics, ensuring consistency and clarity across processes. Most importantly, it presents the right data in the right context to the right person at the right time, enabling better, faster, and more confident decision-making.
That, in turn, changes how procurement measures and proves value. Vessey outlined four value lenses that ORO focuses on:
With a proper orchestration layer, leaders can finally answer executive questions including “Give me a 360-degree view of this supplier,” without stitching together multiple spreadsheets. They can also connect procurement KPIs to enterprise priorities, expenses, resilience, innovation, rather than just cost-out targets.
For C-suite stakeholders, Vessey’s elevator pitch for orchestration was simple: it’s “all about how we increase speed, how we drive control, and how we build resilience in the organization to support long-term success,” without needing to rip and replace the entire tech stack. An orchestration layer gives control over user experience now, and options later about which systems to sunset or deepen.
For teams, the message is different but complimentary. This is not a story of shrinking headcount, but of changing the work mix. “The creativity that each of you brings is special,” he said. “The experience you’ve got can not be taught to an agent.” The opportunity is to offload repetitive tasks to automation and agents, lean into skills around data interpretation, stakeholder influence, and supplier value creation, and let orchestration handle the plumbing.
In that sense, procurement orchestration isn’t just another technology project, it’s a chance to redesign how procurement shows up in the business: as a human-centered, data-driven function that can move at the speed of the enterprise while keeping it safe.
Watch the full webinar recording here!