Process and agentic orchestration has quickly become one of the most important conversations in procurement.
What was once an emerging concept is now widely recognized as essential enterprise infrastructure — the connective layer that enables organizations to simplify complexity, orchestrate cross-functional work, and operationalize AI agents responsibly at scale.
As part of CPOstrategy’s Process Orchestration in Procurement Playbook, Tonkean CEO and Co-Founder Sagi Eliyahu and EVP Satendar Bhatia joined the CPOstrategy team to discuss the evolution of orchestration — from intake automation to enterprise-grade agentic orchestration — and what comes next.
Below is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Sagi Eliyahu:
“When we started Tonkean, process orchestration wasn’t a well-established technology category. Today it’s recognised as essential infrastructure for enterprise operations. That recognition stems from the key realisation that was central to the whole reason we started Tonkean in the first place: enterprise technology should be foremost about people – that is, it should be focused foremost on enabling and empowering people.
This was software’s initial promise: that it would empower humans to focus on high value work. Unfortunately, almost all the enterprise software we use today was built not around people, but data. That’s why our tech stacks are so complex. That’s why so much of everyone’s time is still spent on bureaucracy and filling forms and data. Our tools and our processes weren’t built with us in mind.
Orchestration emerged as a means of finally fulfilling software’s initial promise by bridging that gap. It does this by allowing enterprises to finally build and deploy processes that meet employees where they work. It does so by providing organisations a connective layer that allows you to orchestrate and automate processes across every tool, team, and data source in your stack asynchronously, much as a conductor operates the component parts of an orchestra.
A big part of that is seamlessly incorporating new and innovative capacities into your orchestra, by the way, which is why orchestration has become such an integral part of leveraging AI agents. Orchestration gives you the infrastructure via which to incorporate AI agents into your operations at the process level.”
Satendar Bhatia:
“Enterprise-grade orchestration platforms like Tonkean serve as connective tissue for the business, unifying all the disparate systems, data, and stakeholders involved in key internal processes, and allowing you to orchestrate complex work and surface innovative capabilities for employees across them. Tonkean abstracts away complexity, connects fragmented systems – giving procurement teams complete control and visibility across all key lifecycles – and allows you to tailor the whole of your technology strategy around what should be every organisation’s central technology goal: empowering humans to do their work better.”
Sagi Eliyahu:
“True orchestration, in a nutshell, is enterprise-grade orchestration, which is orchestration that connects every individual component of your organisation, and that’s capable of helping you automate complex work seamlessly across all those components – across every team, tool, system and data source.
Most orchestration platforms don’t do this. They can automate work within specific UIs, or select connected systems, which allows you to automate tasks, but not orchestrate end-to-end processes. They allow you to build or deploy agents that can automate work following predefined steps, but that aren’t proactive or autonomous.
Put another way, limited orchestration allows you to automate tasks, but within the same confines that we’re all familiar with and dislike. True orchestration allows you to automatically achieve outcomes, and tears down the limitations that define modern work in order to facilitate true transformation of experience and outcomes.”
Satendar Bhatia:
“Agentic orchestration is what makes AI agents actually useful at scale. Agentic orchestration is how you instrument AI agents for enterprise. It’s how you define for AI agents what they can and cannot do, what goals they pursue, and what policies and guardrails they’re beholden to.
It puts agents alongside employees in the process orchestration infrastructure, allowing you to build AI agents into the day-to-day processes on which your organisation runs.”
Sagi Eliyahu:
“Moving forward, AI agents – particularly proactive AI agents – must be an essential component of every organisation’s orchestration strategy. The potential of proactive AI agents – governed and managed by end-to-end orchestration – to transform back-office work is massive and frankly hard for us to wrap our heads around.
In the future, procurement organisations with end-to-end proactive AI agents embedded in their orchestration infrastructure will be able to deploy an unlimited number of proactive agents that can execute complex workflows autonomously, without waiting for your command; that identify what work needs doing and do it – that will be capable of handling hundreds of contracts, thousands of invoices, and countless processes in parallel, looping in humans only when human input is required.
Procurement professionals will stop managing tasks, start focusing exclusively on driving strategy, and find themselves achieving the operational leverage of a team 10x their size.
As we’ve seen from the clients who’ve deployed Tonkean’s proactive AI agents, true proactive agentic orchestration transforms procurement from a fundamentally reactive function into a proactive, prolific driver of strategic value.”
Sagi Eliyahu:
“The future of process orchestration in procurement will be defined by processes that provide employees access to proactive, autonomous AI agents that achieve outcomes and automate work at scale on their own.
Procurement will no longer be a back-office bottleneck but a strategic driver of business velocity. Powered by proactive AI agents that procurement teams can orchestrate across their operational infrastructure, process orchestration platforms will, in the future, empower every human inside your organisation to focus more completely on the work for which they’re uniquely suited and that creates the most transformational value for your organisation.”
Satendar Bhatia:
“Organisations possessed of enterprise-grade process and agentic orchestration technology will innovate faster while reducing costs. They’ll grow exponentially more productive while greatly reducing risk and better guaranteeing compliance.
More than anything else, they’ll provide internal processes that fundamentally work for employees, rather than forcing employees to work for technology – and that, experientially, will change everything.
Another way of putting it: it will achieve that initial promise of enterprise software, and perhaps even go beyond it.”
Process orchestration has moved from concept to critical infrastructure. Agentic orchestration is accelerating that shift.
As procurement enters its orchestration era, the organizations that connect their tech stacks, embed governed AI agents into workflows, and design processes around people — not systems — will lead the way.
The future isn’t about more tools.
It’s about orchestration.
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