As global enterprises face a permanent age of volatility, the traditional "detect and repair" model, where risks are identified only after contracts are signed, is becoming obsolete. According to Tricia Miller, SVP Product Marketing and Chief Evangelist at Coupa, the future of the function lies in a unified approach that integrates AI-driven intake with an agentic workforce.
Tricia, who brings 25 years of procurement experience to her role, including tenure as Chief Procurement Officer at Accenture, argues that the key to modern resilience is capturing demand at the earliest possible point. By shifting risk mitigation to the "prevention at entry" stage, organisations can move with the speed required by modern supply chain disruptions. The role of procurement is no longer just about the transaction; it is about the orchestration of demand in a way that protects the business while enabling growth.
The critical role of intelligent intake
Risk in any procurement lifecycle begins the moment a business user identifies a need. Historically, this intake phase was a manual, often-bypassed hurdle that left procurement teams playing catch-up. Tricia notes that risk in the procurement space is incredibly complicated and not always dictated by procurement alone. It involves a web of stakeholders from legal to information security, and when these pieces are siloed, the business suffers.
"Risk in the procurement space is incredibly complicated," Tricia explains. "Unfortunately, it’s not always dictated by procurement. In many cases, procurement is responsible for supporting the third-party risk, the financial risk and data privacy and countless other factors. When we think about the risk and the way it historically has worked, you're finding it down the road. You're maybe already contracted; you brought the supplier in, or someone brought the supplier in the business. They've already contracted with them, and the team is very far in the process at that point and then a risk is identified. It's very difficult to mitigate."
To combat this, the industry is moving toward a model of "intelligent intake.” This process involves capturing demand upfront through a simplified user experience that does not require the internal customer to produce extensive documentation. By understanding what is being bought at the point of origin, the system can determine risk and orchestrate the request through the correct channels.
Tricia emphasises that this is about capturing demand in a very simple way: "I don't need you to write me a 10-page white paper on what you want to buy. You need to tell me what you want to buy." From that simple request, procurement, in partnership with other functions, can ensure the request is processed intelligently and orchestrated to address specific risks.
Navigating the permanent age of volatility
The urgency for this transition is driven by a world where change is the only constant. Tricia highlights that the pace of change is accelerating, meaning procurement must respond to real-life problems like supply chain failures or dropping supplier risk scores with unprecedented speed — an approach that has rapidly become a new baseline for operations.
"I think the age of volatility we're in right now will continue," Tricia says. "Change is more constant today than it was yesterday, and yesterday than it was the day before. That's just going to speed up."
This volatility means that traditional timelines, often stretching into months for risk checks and supplier onboarding, are no longer fit for purpose. Business units require solutions in days or weeks to respond to shifting market conditions. If procurement cannot match this urgency, the business will move around them, creating maverick spend and unmanaged risk. The goal of orchestration is to capture that urgency and execute against it, rather than sticking to the three to five months historically required to partner across functions to manage risk. Speed has become a survival trait for global enterprises, and intake is the mechanism to unlock it.
The power of the community data moat
At the heart of this technological leap is data. While many providers are building orchestration tools, the effectiveness of these tools is dictated by the quality of the underlying data. Coupa leverages a community dataset of just over the US$9.5tn mark. This data is the lifeblood of the AI agents that are currently reshaping the source-to-pay (S2P) process.
Tricia explains this data is not merely a collection of general sets but a 20-year history of actual spend transactions, including millions of sourcing events and trillions of invoices. This allows the AI to function with the expertise of a seasoned professional rather than a novice. In a world where "garbage in, garbage out" is the standard warning for AI implementation, having access to a high-fidelity, contextualised data moat is a critical differentiator.
"Data is king," Tricia asserts. "General data sets, even when procured and stitched together telling a procurement story, are ineffectively articulating what procurement did and how we should predict what it's going to do as a result."
By using this 20-year repository, the AI agents being built are fundamentally more intelligent. Tricia compares the difference to hiring: "When you are leveraging that data to build your agents, you're not hiring someone straight out of school who doesn't know anything. You're hiring someone with years and years of B2B experience. So it is fundamentally an incredibly powerful differentiator."
This differentiation is what allows intake and orchestration to leapfrog older tools that rely on static rules rather than predictive intelligence.
The rise of the agentic workforce
A significant theme in the evolution of procurement is the move toward an agentic workforce, AI agents that do more than just process data to act, advise and assist. This is not about replacing human talent but reallocating it to strategic initiatives. The procurement function has long aspired to be a strategic partner, but it has often been bogged down by the sheer volume of tactical work.
Tricia identifies three primary challenges that the S2P workflow faced before the integration of agentic AI: shortage of workforce, friction in the process and an inability to touch all areas of spend. By automating tactical tasks, procurement teams can shift their focus to higher-value activities — a pivot is where the real return on investment lies.
Tricia adds: "I believe there will be workforce savings as a result of procurement automation that we can move. You take the efficiency you gained here and you reinvest that into the more strategic value to the customers. Depending on what their maturity is now and how much savings they're getting, it's fundamentally up to 10x greater savings."
Practical applications of AI agents
The ROI of agentic AI manifests in both tactical efficiency and strategic advisory roles. Tricia categorises these into two distinct types of agents that procurement leaders should be watching. These AI agents work in tandem with human operators to create a more resilient and efficient function.
1. Agents that act
These agents handle high-volume, rule-based tasks that typically consume hundreds of man-hours across a large organisation. Examples include payment batch creation agents that identify what payments need to be batched together, following simple rules and eliminating hours of manual work every week. Another powerful example is found in expense management. Historically, expense auditing is a manual process that happens after the money has left the building, leading to a "find and fix" mentality.
"With agents, we are able to read every line item on the receipt at the time of entry, now that future-state audit is no longer needed," Tricia notes. "We save time there and we make savings there too, because you're finding the problems before you pay it out." This proactive stance is the hallmark of modern procurement.
2. Agents that advise and assist
These agents help with complex strategic work, such as category strategy. Traditionally, creating a category strategy is a laborious effort involving weeks of data gathering, stakeholder interviews and market analysis. It leads to a document that is often out of date by the time it is finished. Now, "category consultant" agents can analyse spend patterns and market data to help create and summarise strategies in real-time.
This empowers the category manager to focus on what humans do best: communicating value, building relationships and managing complex negotiations. "Your category manager has the time to do what they need to do, which is communicate the value of buying against that category strategy to the customer, not creating the category strategy," Tricia says. By removing the "grunt work" of strategy creation, AI allows human managers to focus on the execution and advocacy of that strategy.
Breaking down functional silos
One of the most profound impacts of real-time financial data is the dissolution of silos between procurement and finance. When spend patterns are visible in real time, the relationship shifts from a transactional one to a strategic partnership. Tricia argues that the insights procurement holds on spending behaviour are of immense value to finance for forecasting and budgeting.
“The amount of third-party spend that goes through an organisation and the value of managing that benefits not just procurement but the organisation overall; it's finance's priority," she explains.
The connection between these functions, from forecasting to actual spend and through to payment, creates a powerful feedback loop. Tricia reflects on her own time as a CPO, noting that the partnership with finance allowed the organisation to move beyond just having a savings target to actually removing that money from the budget, ensuring a direct impact on the bottom line. This level of synchronisation ensures that procurement's efforts are visible and felt in the company's financial health, rather than being relegated to a spreadsheet of "theoretical" savings.
Procurement as the universal connector
Because procurement touches every part of an organisation, its ability to provide data-driven insights makes it a vital partner across all departments. Tricia points out that when you bring intelligence to other functions, you change their perspective on value, a process that allows procurement to move from being a department that people "have to use" to one that people "want to use.”
- HR: Demonstrating patterns in consultant hiring and suggesting alternative hiring strategies or talent pools.
- Legal: Identifying where strategic legal services are being bought versus technical services to refine buying strategies and reduce billable hours.
- Security and risk: Providing early visibility into supplier vulnerabilities before they become a breach, protecting the brand's reputation.
When these connections are effectively delivered, the buying groups, which hold the budget, finally understand the value of procurement. Procurement is no longer a police function but an influential advisor that helps departments reduce their spend overall. This visibility into "how" the business buys allows procurement to influence the demand side of the equation, not just the supply side.
Compliance as a service
The concept of compliance as a service is a cornerstone of this new model. By digitising workflows and leveraging trillions of dollars in transaction data, systems can now identify fraudulent buying behaviour in real time. Whether it is intentional fraud or simple human error, the system flags patterns of concern within the invoicing or purchasing process as they happen.
"Now as we move that forward and move into this next layer, and we really do supplement everything that we've had historically with the agents and with the orchestration, that compliance as a service is fundamentally powered," Tricia adds. "It goes back to risk management. Risk managed seamlessly means having early visibility and then executing the actions needed without friction, leveraging as much intelligence and automation as possible."
This shift to real-time compliance eliminates the need for massive, retroactive audit projects that often fail to recover the full value of leaked spend. Instead, the "leak" is plugged before the water ever starts to flow.
2026: the year of predictive resilience
As organisations navigate 2026, the focus is shifting from simple tool deployment to continuous optimisation. Tricia emphasises that the journey does not end with implementation. In an environment where technology moves faster than ever, procurement organisations must actively manage their tech roadmap to solve emerging business problems.
"It's no longer, 'I deployed it, we're good.’ It's, 'What's the next innovation? How's that going to solve my problem?,'" she says.
The concept of predictive resilience and data liquidity will be the final pieces of the foundation for success in the coming year. While many organisations worry about their own garbage data, the beauty of modern AI is that it allows companies to use community data sets to learn and improve their own data maturity. This synchrony brings differentiated outcomes to life much quicker than we have ever seen historically. It allows even smaller procurement teams to operate with the sophistication of a global powerhouse.
The strategic pivot
The evolution of procurement from a back-office function to a strategic powerhouse is no longer a theoretical goal, it is a data-driven reality. By prioritising intelligent intake, leveraging massive community data sets and deploying an agentic workforce, global enterprises can finally achieve the level of influence they have sought for a decade.
For Tricia, the human element remains at the centre. AI is the engine that creates the capacity for procurement professionals to be the strategic value partners they were meant to be. "The agentic workforce in partnership with your workforce, intake capturing it, orchestration executing it, will mean you're taking the friction out, you're touching more spend, driving more savings and fundamentally able to shift to that strategic value partner that we as procurement professionals have aspired to be for 10 years."
As we navigate 2026, the message to the procurement community is clear: the tools are here to handle the volatility. The only question is how quickly organisations can pivot to use them. The 10x savings potential is not just a figure; it is a roadmap for the future of the profession.
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Tricia Miller
SVP Product Marketing and Chief Evangelist