The New AI in Procurement Playbook: A 3-Step Plan to Transform Into an AI-First Finance Organization

The mandate for finance and procurement has fundamentally shifted and in today’s rapidly accelerating business landscape, it’s not going to slow down any time soon. As Zia Mansoor, Microsoft’s CVP Cloud & AI platforms, and Chad Gaydos, Procurify’s CEO, shared during Pulse’s 2025 keynote session, Becoming a Frontier Firm: How Leaders Win the AI Shift, AI has gone from being an experiment to a daily rhythm of work. The new goal isn’t merely adopting AI, it’s becoming an AI frontier firm—an organization that’s leveraging the tech to scale and drive a competitive advantage.

For procurement teams, this means moving beyond the more traditional role of enforcement. As Gaydos put it: “The future of procurement is now moving to empowerment so that we’re giving teams the speed, the insight, the confidence to make smarter decisions in real time.”

But what exactly does this transformation look like? Microsoft defines an AI frontier firm as one that operates with “on-demand intelligence,” powered by a mix of humans and AI agents to make AI foundational. This isn’t an overnight flip; it’s a strategic journey that evolves through three distinct phases.

The new procurement playbook takes a deep dive into the phases for becoming an AI-first organization, supported by forward-thinking finance leaders, allowing you to identify where your company stands and how to proactively move forward.

Phase 1: Human with an AI assistant (boosting individual productivity)

This is the most common starting point and likely where most companies are today. It’s about AI working one-to-one to help individuals accelerate existing tasks.

• What it looks like: The AI acts as a personal assistant or co-pilot to help with getting work done faster. It provides an immediate, one-off productivity gain for the employee.
• The AI in procurement proposition: An AP specialist uses a tool to process an invoice upload faster, turning hours of documentation into minutes. A buyer uses an AI feature to summarize a vendor contract quickly. The AI accelerates a single step, but the human is still responsible for managing the entire end-to-end workflow.
• The goal: Getting every employee comfortable with using AI to help them get things done faster and better.

Phase 2: Human-led, AI-augmented teams (delegating work)

In Phase 2, the business ROI sees a notable increase as AI moves from assisting the individual to augmenting the team. This is where the concept of the AI agent emerges.

• What it looks like: AI agents become digital colleagues that can take on work autonomously. Humans lead the process, but they delegate multi-step tasks to these agents. For example, a project agent turns meeting notes into a full plan and assigns tasks. Organizations start to see new concepts emerge, like the optimal human and agent ratio on a team.
• The AI in procurement proposition: The procurement team delegates entire segments of a workflow to an agent or AI platform. This may include automatically turning approved purchase requisitions into purchase orders (POs) to reduce risk and human error or automating manual reconciliations to drastically reduce output hours. The human reviews the agent’s output and manages the exceptions.
• The goal: Moving beyond one-off tasks to delegating multi-step work to AI agents to transform team productivity and break down data silos.

Phase 3: AI-operated and human-led (achieving autonomous processes)

This is the true frontier phase—where the business is re-architected to be AI-first. Intelligence is woven into the very fabric of the organization.
What it looks like: Entire processes can run autonomously with humans providing strategic oversight and it’s less about AI use cases and more about resharping business processes. Humans become directors and exception handlers, focusing on judgment and strategy.

Mansoor notes that this is where “org charts shift and you start seeing these human-led teams supported by AI agents. You’re also going to start seeing metrics evolve.”

• The AI in procurement proposition: The entire Accounts Payable (AP) process runs autonomously: AI handles the ingestion, matching, payments, and booking. The human team focuses on the exceptions and strategic analysis. Procurement is no longer chasing paper trails but using real-time spend insights and AI to anticipate needs, personalize every touchpoint, and drive faster decisions.
• Gaydos summarizes the ultimate outcome: “The world doesn’t need another platform that just automates tasks. What it needs is a platform that thinks with you.”
• The goal: Running autonomous processes where humans provide strategy, judgment, and manage exceptions, achieving intelligence on demand.

Your next step to getting the edge on AI in procurement

The future of spend management isn’t about choosing between the control of traditional procure-to-pay and the speed of agent orchestration—it’s about their convergence where businesses can combine enterprise-grade control with human-led simplicity.

It’s about platforms where AI doesn’t live beside the process; it’s inside of it.

By redefining the AI edge for mid-market procurement teams, Procurify ensures every AI-driven insight is accurate, auditable, and secure to deliver:

AI that’s woven In: Intelligence is embedded into every step of the intake-to-pay journey, from the first request to the final payment.

AI as an extension: Providing a system that not only reports what happened but also explains why and what to do next.

AI built on trust: Offering the governance and infrastructure to turn intelligence into a trusted extension of your finance organization.
“You get speed and simplicity without losing control,” says Gaydos. “You get insight and automation without losing trust.”

This is the driving force of the new procurement playbook and the emerging standard for AI-powered spend management: a system that not only processes spend but understands it.