IDC Research Spotlight: Orchestrating the Agentic Future of Spend

Why Procurement Needs a New Operating System 

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Every major enterprise function has a foundational operating system. Finance has the general ledger, HR has the HRIS, and Sales has the CRM. These are the architectural anchors that run core processes and unify data. Procurement never got one.

Instead, enterprises were sold heavy Source-to-Pay (S2P) suites under the promise that consolidating to a single vendor would solve fragmentation. But these legacy suites were built for a version of enterprise procurement that no longer exists. When confronted with multi-entity structures, fragmented ERP landscapes, and modern global complexity, the suite model cracks.

Now, with corporate mandates to adopt AI, procurement leaders are facing a credibility test. In this exclusive IDC Spotlight Report, Patrick Reymann (Research Director, Procurement Applications and Agents) outlines why spend orchestration has emerged as the definitive architectural answer to decoupling user experience from legacy data models and unlocking a true agentic future.

What You’ll Learn inside the Report:

• The "S2P Off-Ramp": How to progressively bypass legacy suite limitations using an "augment-then-replace" strategy, eliminating the risk of a chaotic rip-and-replace migration.
• The 5 Sticky Forces of Inertia: Why enterprise teams continue to renew restrictive S2P contracts—and how the right orchestration architecture systematically deconstructs process entanglement and data gravity.
• The Architectural Dividing Line: How to separate marketing hype from enabling technology by applying IDC’s taxonomy across AI Assistants, AI Advisors, and autonomous AI Agents.
• The BPO Reckoning: Why agentic AI disrupts traditional labor arbitrage and how forward-thinking procurement leaders must reshape their outsourcing relationships.
• An Actionable Blueprint: Crucial evaluation criteria and the specific questions procurement leaders must ask vendors to test for true enterprise-grade orchestration depth.

Is your current foundation built to adapt Agentic transformation with enterprise complexity, or simply retrofitted to it? Download the full IDC report to discover how to build a flexible, future-proof operating model that lets orchestration govern, agents execute, and people lead.