Q&A: Fin's Natalia Martin Garcia on AI in Procurement

As procurement takes its place in the centre of business resilience, the way procurement operates has had to change. With the emergence of AI, procurement has become a more efficient and people-focused process than ever before.

Zip Forward London brought together more than 300 procurement and finance leaders. Over the space of one day, leaders had the opportunity to strategise and develop a bold new vision for the future of the industry. 

At the event, Procurement Magazine spoke to Natalia Martin Garcia, Head of Procurement at Fin, to hear about how AI agents are revolutionising its procurement processes. 

At Fin, she has led the procurement function for the last four and a half years.

With extensive experience in business operations, she has successfully overseen the transition of Fin's procurement department into a streamlined, automated operation using advanced intake orchestration and AI.

Can you explain what Fin is for those who do not know?

Intercom is the complete service platform. Fin is our highest resolution agent. It's able to resolve very complex customer issues end-to-end, take care of your inbound sales and it can integrate with any help desk or any channel with very little interaction. 

What has driven your relationship with Zip?

We went live with Zip in September last year and it has transformed our procurement. Originally, our users were having issues just interacting with the system. It took too long. It was too difficult. So by moving and transitioning to Zip, we've reduced the number of queries from the users to like a 10% of what we had before and everything is just seamless.

We use it from intake to pay and we've just deployed four new agents the last three days. I haven't used them yet, but the team are using it. I can't wait to get some feedback.

What are you excited about for your digital transformation?

Risk orchestration is something that I'm really looking forward to. I think it's something that all companies should tap into. There's so much to do in that field, so I can't wait to start using it.

How has technology transformed your processes?

We had three different systems for security reviews, for contract reviews, for procurement requests and now everything is together. So we do not need to reach out to stakeholders in separate systems. We do not need to train our stakeholders in different systems. Now, we can communicate within a dashboard and we are then able to produce reporting against it in one place.

What does this mean for you and your team?

What I see is that I am going to be doing a lot of meaningful work in the sense that up until now we had to do a lot of checking a lot of minutia that we're not going to have to do, so therefore I'm going to be able to add value.

I'm going to be able to do proper negotiation. I'm going to be able to create a strategy. I'm going to be able to teach my team. I'm going to be able to elevate them.