The AI Agent Nobody's Building in ProcureTech...

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Hi {{FIRST_NAME|readers}},

Two things before I reveal the AI Agent that's almost certainly not on your radar…

#1:
After 12+ months of saying the same thing at the bottom of every newsletter, we had a realization… If it's worth repeating every single week, it's probably not worth saying at all.

So we're mixing it up. Starting today, the footer gets rotating content that actually deserves your attention. Finally, a reason to scroll all the way down.

#2:
Most procurement tech events follow the same tired script. Vendor booths. Feature demos. Polished case studies. You leave inspired by what's possible... but clueless about how to make it work in your company.

Our first ever conference, ProcureTech Unpacked (April 22-24) flips that script.

Yes, you'll see what the market offers. But you'll also get the frameworks to build the business case, structure the roadmap, design the governance, and lead the change management that turns "possible" into "done."

Here's what you get:

Take this 2-minute survey to learn more. No commitment. But space is limited by design, and it's first-come, first-served. We'll personally reach out to everyone who raises their hand to make sure it's the right fit.

Alright, now for today's main event...

Onwards!

📰 In this week’s edition:

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Anyone who's ever tried to administer a shared drive or MS Teams site with 20 colleagues knows the truth…

It's a warzone.

Nobody takes the time to establish naming conventions or a decent folder structure. Nobody documents usage rules. Plus, the shared drive doesn't enforce any of them anyway. And then? Old colleagues leave. New ones arrive. Nobody trains the new people on how to use the shared drive, let alone how it's administered (if it ever was)…

But very quickly, your beautifully organized digital workspace becomes a flaming dumpster of files…

Hypothetically… Maybe you spend a weekend building out a pristine SharePoint site. Naming conventions. Folder structure. A "READ ME FIRST" file that precisely zero people will read.

Then folders like "Sophie's Files" and "Jerry's Contracts" start popping up at the root level. So you sit down with each of them, calmly explaining why they can't do that. And they politely nod and say yes to get you out of their office, but you can tell they don't see the slow motion trainwreck occurring in front of their eyes.

Within a month, everyone has their own personal folder on the shared drive. Within three months, nobody can find anything. Within six, people are emailing files to each other because, and I quote, "the shared drive is a mess."

Hypothetically.

I'm not bitter, you're bitter.

Now, you'd think we'd all have learned this lesson by now. But the same thing happens with every new system too if you're not careful.

A shiny new procurement platform gets implemented. Configurations get designed. Workflows get built. Approval matrices get set up. And the thinking behind why it was all designed that way?

Nowhere to be found…

I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret of system implementations:

The first thing to get cut is when timelines get tight?

DOCUMENTATION.

Every. Single. Time.

I've been in situations where I onboard a project a year or two after initial implementation and the first thing I have to do is reverse engineer the thinking of the team who set it up. Why is this approval threshold set at $10K? Why does this workflow skip category managers for IT spend? Why is there a separate process for this one business unit?

Nobody knows. The person who designed it left two years ago. The documentation is a half-finished Confluence page with a "Draft" watermark that was last edited in 2022.

I know writing is hard and most people hate to do it… But dang!

I'm not bitter, you're bitter.

Now here's where it gets really interesting… and really dangerous.

In the world of AI and workflow automation, the problem above doesn't just persist. It accelerates.

Because now we're not just configuring static approval workflows. We're building AI agents. We're designing automated processes that make decisions. We're creating interconnected systems that talk to each other.

And the questions that matter become exponentially more important:

These are all things that are absolutely critical to understand when deciding whether to create new “Agents” and workflows or to modify existing ones. Ideally, you want to build a holistic, all-encompassing, coherent workflow and AI agent architecture.

You want a well-designed house. Not the Winchester Mansion…

That's what your ProcureTech architecture ends up looking like without documentation and governance. And it's what your AI agent ecosystem will look like if we keep building the way we always have.

So here's my question:

Why aren't we using our newfound Generative and Agentic AI capabilities to solve this exact problem?

Where is the Solution Architecture AI Agent?

An AI agent purpose-built to support solution administrators when they're creating new workflows, designing other agents, configuring approval matrices, or modifying existing processes. One that:

I want an AI agent that ensures my team is crafting our procurement systems while considering the whole, not just patching the latest fire.

Think of it as an “architectural review board that never sleeps, never forgets, and never leaves the company”.

If someone is working on an agent like this, I haven't seen it.

(Seriously, get in touch…)

I've seen AI agents for sourcing. For contract analysis. For spend classification. For supplier risk monitoring.

But the foundational layer (the one that governs how all of this is designed and maintained) is still a human-dependent, documentation-optional, institutional-knowledge-in-someone's-head process.

And then we collectively wonder why 80%+ of digital transformation initiatives fail.

We're still smoking ourselves to the grave. Just with a nicer pipe.

If there's something out there I'm not aware of, reply to this email and let me know.

I'd love to be wrong on this one.