PROCUREMENT MAGAZINE WHITEPAPER
Stage 4( Autonomy: agentic sourcing and contracting) At the autonomous stage, sourcing and contracting agents execute routine processes across the source-to-pay cycle. This allows procurement teams to focus on supplier partnerships, innovation and sustainability – shifting effort away from execution and towards strategic engagement.
Vale’ s procurement transformation exemplifies this at scale. The global mining company went live with Coupa in 2025 as part of its Supply Transformation Global Programme, launched in 2024 to redesign purchasing processes through AI-native technology and process simplification. Managing US $ 14bn in annual purchases across 8,000 active suppliers and 660,000 orders, Vale replaced over 20 legacy systems – including its Supplier Portal( Nimbi) – with Coupa’ s integrated platform connected to market intelligence( Beroe), spend analytics( Sievo), supplier management( Linkana) and materials / services systems( CH Master). This architecture enhances autonomous purchases through AI and machine learning while automating over 90 governance controls and systematically embedding ESG practices into decision-making.
Vale CPO Marco Braga emphasised the collaborative approach:“ The partners are also part of the transformation. For Vale, collaborative work and active listening through genuine partnerships are fundamental for joint growth and evolution.”
The implementation marks the beginning of a new phase, creating a unified channel for suppliers to access negotiations, orders and communication while improving the purchasing experience for requesters, buyers and suppliers.
Coupa’ s AI agents, such as Navi™, provide workflow-level automation. Through Navi, users can create requisitions, evaluate supplier data and produce reports using conversational language.
“ Navi is becoming the user experience, taking over from the pointing, clicking and finding your way through menus,” Peter Truman, Senior Director of Technical Architects at Coupa explains.
“ It could be as trivial as raising a purchase requisition, or something a lot more complicated about analysing the data associated with a particular set of interactions that a Coupa customer is having with their suppliers,” he says.
Navi’ s specialised agents, including network modelling and knowledge agents, go beyond basic tasks to help users model supply chain scenarios, extract contract information and minimise errors.
“ It’ s bringing that higher-order work to what they’ re doing rather than just automating a task that’ s already there,” Peter adds.“ It’ s bringing in the richness of the data within the Coupa platform and helping users make decisions faster based on data they may not have even known existed.”
80 March 2026