Touchless, Transparent, Trusted: The New Mandate for Agentic Procurement

Why the winning strategy isn’t “more agents,” but better orchestration, clearer metrics, and a people-led approach to change.

For procurement leaders, the promise of agentic AI is no longer the question. The real question is how to turn that promise into measurable outcomes without creating additional complexity, additional silos, and additional work for teams that are already stretched. Leading transformation programs do not start with technology for its own sake; they start with a clear business problem, a disciplined operating model, and a willingness to redesign how work flows across people, systems, and policies.

This was the core message from a recent webinar with SIG: agentic procurement creates value when it is embedded into orchestration, governed with intent, and designed around the people that actually use it.

Start with the problem

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is starting with the desire to “use AI” rather than a problem actually worth solving. As Ryan Whitmore, Senior Solutions Architect, notes, “Start with a real business problem, pick one process that’s painful, measurable, and visible, improve the process, measure the results, build trust with the users, and then expand on those principles.” That is a practical roadmap for any procurement team trying to move beyond experimentation.

This matters because many AI initiatives stall when they are treated as isolated prototypes. A chatbot that answers a question or a model that extracts data may look impressive, but it does not automatically change the way procurement operates. There is a useful distinction between experiments and outcomes: if the work is not tied to cycle time reduction, spend under management, compliance, or transaction efficiency, it is hard to call it transformation.

Ryan walks through a typical marketing campaign request to illustrate what this looks like in practice. An employee describes the need in natural language, the system recognizes the need to purchase marketing services, recommends the right category, surfaces the appropriate supplier, and then orchestrates the risk checks, quote collection, approvals, and PO creation across existing systems. The requester experiences a single, guided flow, while the orchestration layer coordinates the agents, third-party risk tools, and source-to-pay platforms behind the scenes, across multiple languages and data sources.

Orchestration is the foundation

The reality is that agentic capabilities do not work best in isolation, as standalone features, but create real value when embedded into a broader orchestration layer that connects systems, channels, and stakeholders. Matt Kapadia, Head of Enterprise Solutions described ORO’s role as helping customers “get value out of an orchestration platform,” while reducing the friction that makes procurement hard to engage.

He also explains the impact of that model in simple terms: “You’d see from an operational standpoint, no move swivel chair activity within the procurement team. Everything is seamlessly orchestrated within a single platform.” That is more than a statement of convenience, it is a signal that the real prize is not just automation, but the removal of hidden complexity that drains productivity across the function.

Building trust through transparency

Agentic procurement can only scale if users trust the results, and that trust does not come from flashy interfaces or broad claims around autonomy. Rather, trust is built from transparency, explainability, and auditability. Ryan’s view is direct: “Trust comes from transparency. Users need to understand what the AI did, why it made the recommendation, and why it either made the proposal or the decision that it did.”

That principle is especially important in procurement, where policy, compliance, and risk are always present. Users need to see not just the output, but the logic behind it. They need to know why a category was recommended, why a request moved to a certain step, and what information influenced the decision. Without that visibility, AI becomes a black box. With it, AI becomes a guided experience that people can actually adopt.

Measure what matters

Another evergreen lesson shared by Matt is that transformation should be measured by business results, not by the number of agents deployed. Matt noted that organizations often focus on how many agents they have built, but “unless they’re starting that conversation, talking about the results they’ve driven through agentic efforts, it’s probably not all that much more than a science experiment.”

The metrics that truly matter are the ones that procurement leaders already care about: touchless transactions, cycle time, spend under management, supplier onboarding speed, and compliance adherence. For executives, the value story differs by audience. CFOs may care about working capital and visibility, while CPOs may care more about transaction efficiency and control, but both are ultimately asking the same question: does this reduce friction and improve business performance?

One example shared is a global enterprise that used ORO purely as an orchestration layer on top of its third-party risk platform. By giving suppliers a single front door and eliminating the need to juggle multiple portals and email threads, they reduced cycle times by more than 80%. That kind of improvement does not come from deploying “more agents," it comes from aligning agentic capabilities to a specific outcome and measuring the impact on cycle time, risk workflows, and stakeholder experience.

People-led transformation wins

“People-led” is more than a theme; it is the operating principle behind successful procurement change and transformation. Technology can expose broken processes, but cannot fix organizational reluctance on its own. Matt captures this spirit well: “A very pretty front end on a broken process is still a broken process.” That is why change management can’t be a side activity - it is the transformation itself.

When orchestration is done well, the experience changes not just for procurement, but for every stakeholder. In one implementation described during the session, requesters no longer needed to chase procurement, legal, or third-party risk by email to understand where things stood. The orchestration layer exposed every step of the process, which team owned the current risk, how long each step typically took, and how to contact that owner directly through embedded chat. That transparency helped shift the narrative away from procurement as a black box and surfaced bottlenecks in adjacent functions, giving leaders a clearer view of where process improvements would move the needle.

Teams that use early wins gain real credibility, starting small, showing value quickly, and then scaling based on what the organization has learned. They also help procurement teams move away from repetitive, low-value work and towards more strategic business partnering. In that sense, agentic procurement is not about replacing people, but rather, elevating them.

The new mandate

A key takeaway for procurement leaders is that they cannot wait for the market to settle before acting. Organizations that are moving now are learning faster, building stronger governance, and creating reusable operating models that can support future innovation. As Matt shares, “this is an ‘and’ conversation, not an ‘or’ conversation - teams can use orchestration as the foundation while still building and integrating new AI capabilities over time.”

That is the real promise of agentic procurement; not autonomy for its own sake, but a scalable, governed way to turn intelligence into execution. And not just faster procurement, but better procurement: more visible, more compliant, more human, and more connected to the business it serves.

Ready to go deeper? Watch the replay of the discussion, “Turning Agentic Procurement into Results: A People-Led Approach to Scalable Transformation,” with Matt Kapadia and Ryan Whitmore, now available on demand in the ORO Labs Resource Center.

By Kate Jeter, Director of Global Field Marketing

Kate Jeter is a strategic B2B procurement tech marketing leader with 25+ years of experience specializing in field marketing, events, and demand generation for SaaS and enterprise platforms. Before ORO, she was the Head of Marketing, Community, and Growth at ProcureTech. She is an expert in aligning marketing and sales for revenue acceleration, pipeline growth, and global brand positioning.