Lance Younger discusses how ORO Labs’ intake and orchestration platform uses AI agents to transform procurement through agentic orchestration

The procurement technology landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, with AI and agentic systems fundamentally reshaping how organisations approach their procurement processes.

Lance Younger, EVP, EMEA GM and Global Alliances at ORO Labs, is well placed to reflect on the progression from the ERP era to source-to-pay, followed by an explosion of best-of-breed solutions.

“ We went from an ERP world, where over 50 % of the market was dominated by the top 10 businesses, to the proliferation of over 4,000 best-of-breed solutions that specialise in solving individual business challenges with great depth,” he says. Now, the AI era is compressing innovation cycles further, making ecosystem integration critical. This is where intake and orchestration platforms act as connective fabric between backbone systems like SAP, S2P platforms, bestof-breed solutions and AI agents. ORO Labs and SAP’ s strategic partnership positions the former’ s intake and orchestration platform as a complementary layer to the latter’ s core procurement systems. Unlike vendors seeking to replace existing systems, ORO takes a different approach.

Lance continues:“ ORO is looking to augment the ecosystem so companies get the most out of each procuretech investment, including essential backbone applications like SAP Ariba.” ORO research reveals that, while 85 % of organisations are pursuing AI initiatives, just 49 % can clearly articulate what“ agentic” actually means.

“ It’ s almost like a new lease of life or a new ROI on the assets you’ ve already invested in,”

Lance Younger, EVP, EMEA GM and Global Alliances ORO Labs