Each year, Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Procurement and Sourcing Solutions offers a pulse check on the technologies shaping procurement’s future. But viewed across time, these reports tell a deeper story—one of acceleration, convergence, and the emergence of a new digital foundation for the function itself.
Between 2023 and 2025, a few clear trends have emerged. Intake management has risen from a behind-the-scenes support capability to a visible gateway for business engagement. Procurement orchestration has gone from emerging concept to essential enabler. Generative AI has cycled through initial euphoria into the more grounded work of value realization. And now, Agentic AI is poised to reshape how we define automation and intelligence in procurement altogether.
These shifts are not theoretical. They are being driven by hard business realities: increasing complexity, geopolitical risk, talent scarcity, regulatory scrutiny, and the relentless pressure to do more with less. As procurement moves from a transactional cost center to a strategic hub, the technologies chosen today will define how ready the function is to lead tomorrow.
This blog post will explore what the Hype Cycles from 2023 to 2025 reveal, and what it means for organizations seeking to navigate this new landscape.
In 2023, Gartner listed Intake Management as an emerging solution with moderate benefit. It was viewed as a tactical layer: useful, but not strategic. Fast forward to 2025, and intake has surged to the Peak of Inflated Expectations, as procurement teams embrace its potential to serve as a unified front door for sourcing, purchasing, risk reviews, and more.
What caused this shift? In short, user experience. Procurement tools have long been designed for power users rather than for the business stakeholders who submit the bulk of requests. Intake management promised to fix that. And with advances in automation and AI, it’s starting to deliver.
But the most significant evolution hasn’t been in intake alone. Introduced formally in the 2024 Hype Cycle, procurement orchestration has quickly gained traction as a category of its own. By 2025, it’s no longer a niche capability. It’s a transformational platform-level strategy.
Orchestration platforms go beyond routing requests. They coordinate data, processes, and decisions across fragmented systems to fulfill business outcomes. They don’t replace existing procurement tools. They make them work better together. This is especially critical in today’s environment, where agility and compliance can no longer be traded off against each other.
As Gartner cautions, intake and orchestration are not the same. Intake starts the process. Orchestration ensures the process delivers value.
It’s hard to overstate the excitement that generative AI generated in 2023 and 2024. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and user-friendly interfaces like ChatGPT, procurement leaders began imagining a world where sourcing events, contracts, and supplier insights could be generated (or at least augmented) by AI assistants.
In the 2024 Hype Cycle, generative AI was at the very peak of hype. Seventy-three percent of procurement teams planned to adopt it by year’s end. But by 2025, the tone had shifted. Generative AI has now entered the Trough of Disillusionment. Early pilots delivered productivity gains, but real ROI proved elusive for many.
The challenge wasn’t with the technology—it was with expectations. Generative AI isn’t magic. It’s a powerful tool, but one that requires thoughtful integration, data governance, and trust-building. The good news? Despite the cooling of initial excitement, Gartner still expects generative AI in procurement to reach the Plateau of Productivity within two to five years. The path to maturity is clearer. The use cases (i.e., contract drafting, supplier research, intake triage) are becoming more focused and value-driven.
If generative AI is about language and prediction, Agentic AI is about action. Newly introduced in the 2025 Hype Cycle, Agentic AI marks the next frontier.
Agentic AI refers to systems built on AI agents—autonomous or semi-autonomous software entities that perceive, decide, and act on behalf of users. Unlike traditional RPA or workflow automation, agents learn from each interaction, adapt to context, and can execute complex tasks with minimal human intervention.
In procurement, the potential is profound. Imagine agents that monitor supplier risk in real time, initiate sourcing events when thresholds are crossed, or negotiate contract terms based on historical precedent and real-time data. This isn’t five years away—it’s already being piloted.
But Agentic AI also introduces new questions around trust, oversight, and governance. Procurement teams will need to invest in skills, frameworks, and cross-functional alignment to realize the full potential of this technology.
Across each of these themes—intake, orchestration, generative AI, and now agentic AI—ORO Labs is uniquely positioned.
Since Gartner first introduced the intake management and procurement orchestration categories, ORO has been listed in both. That’s not a coincidence. ORO was designed from day one to address the complexity and fragmentation of modern procurement. It’s not just an intake tool. It’s not just a workflow engine. It’s a full orchestration platform that unifies systems, guides stakeholders, and enforces compliance, while making it all intuitive and user-friendly.
Consider the following:
In other words, we didn’t build ORO to ride the hype wave. We built it to solve the problems that the Hype Cycle validates: fragmentation, complexity, user resistance, and the growing need for intelligent automation.
So what should procurement leaders take away from three years of Hype Cycles?
First, that momentum is real. Intake management, orchestration, and AI are no longer emerging—they’re expected. Teams that wait risk falling behind.
Second, not all vendors are equal. As Gartner notes, many vendors use orchestration language without delivering orchestration capability. The same applies to AI. Leaders need to look beyond labels and assess depth, architecture, and outcomes.
Third, that the next three years will matter more than the last three. With agentic AI entering the scene and procurement platforms becoming more composable, the foundation laid now will define procurement’s role for the next decade.
The good news? Procurement is ready. As Gartner suggests, the function has reached a point of maturity where it can lead rather than follow digital transformation. And with the right orchestration platform in place, it can deliver not just efficiency, but also agility, intelligence, and strategic impact.