AI agents in company purchasing: requests, order approval and invoice checks

Take a hypothetical manufacturing company with 180 employees. The production manager writes an email: “we need bearings like last time”. Someone in purchasing asks exactly which ones, from whom and by when. After three emails an order is placed, but without the director’s approval, because the amount “probably didn’t exceed the threshold”.

A month later the invoice arrives. It has no order number, so the accountant asks three people who placed the order. These are not big losses on a single case, but with several hundred purchases a month they add up to many hours of work.

Typical places where the process breaks down:

An AI agent can only enforce rules that exist in writing. A single table approved by the management board is enough. You will find an example for a mid-sized company in the table at the end of this section – adjust the categories and thresholds to your own scale.

Describe an emergency route separately, for example for when a machine breaks down. The purchase can then go ahead immediately, with approval following within one working day. Without such a route, people start bypassing the whole process.

This is where an agent shows its advantage over a form. An employee writes an ordinary sentence in Teams: “I need 20 6205 bearings for line 2 by Friday”. The agent recognises the category, asks for any missing details and checks whether there is a framework agreement with a supplier of that part.

On that basis, the agent creates a request, for example in a SharePoint list or in the ERP system – the system for managing orders, inventory and finance. It checks the threshold and starts the right approval route. The employee does not need to know the purchase categories or thresholds – the agent guides them through the process.

The agent is also useful the other way round. Someone in purchasing can ask “show me requests that have been waiting more than three days” or “how much have we bought from this supplier this quarter?” instead of going through spreadsheets.

Approval is the heart of the purchasing process. The agent gathers the details, describes the context in two sentences and attaches the quote, and Power Automate sends the request to the right people in Teams or Outlook. For larger amounts, approval can go in sequence: first the manager, then the CFO.

The agent can also spot things a person might easily miss. For example, three orders of PLN 19,000 each from the same supplier in one week look like a purchase split to stay below the threshold. Such a warning is worth showing to the approver on the decision card.

The decision always stays with a person. Also bear in mind a technical limitation: a single process run in Power Automate lasts no more than 30 days. Reminders and handing the case to a deputy must therefore kick in well before then.

Adding a new supplier is the point at which a company most easily loses money. The agent can collect details and documents from the person requesting it, and carry out some of the checks itself in public registers. The Polish Ministry of Finance provides an interface (API) for checking the VAT white list automatically.

The white list has specific tax consequences. Suppose you pay for a transaction worth more than PLN 15,000 into an account that is not on the list. You then lose the right to treat the expense as a tax-deductible cost and become jointly liable for the supplier’s VAT. You can avoid this by notifying the tax office within 7 days of the transfer.

A sensible set of checks for a new supplier:

Since 1 February 2026, every company has received invoices through KSeF, the government system through which invoices between businesses pass. Since 1 April 2026, most sellers have issued them there, so a domestic invoice usually arrives as structured data rather than as a PDF attached to an email. This makes automated checking much easier.

The simplest check is matching three documents: the order, the goods receipt and the invoice. If the supplier, quantity and amount match, the invoice can go for payment without another business decision. The agent or a Power Automate process only flags differences and sends them to the person who placed the order.

For this to work, suppliers must put the order number on the invoice. It is worth asking regular suppliers to do so in writing, and sending invoices without a number for clarification rather than guessing who placed the order.

An agent that is supposed to check budgets, contract prices and order status needs access to the ERP. The scope of this work depends on whether your system has an interface for exchanging data and what operations it makes available. In some systems it is a few days of configuration, in others a separate project.

It is safest to start with read access: the agent checks data but changes nothing in the ERP. Add order creation by the agent later, with permissions limited to that one operation and a record of who requested it. The agent should not have wider access than the purchasing employee who works with it.

Not every company needs an agent. With a few dozen similar requests a month, a form with a few fields and approval in Power Automate will deliver most of the benefits at a lower cost. An agent adds most value where requests are varied, described in people’s own words and often sent back to be completed. See the comparison in the table below.

Choose one purchase category with a large number of requests, such as IT hardware or machine parts. Before you change anything, measure three things across the last 50 purchases in that category. Repeat the same measurements after the new process has been running for a few weeks.

The plan could look like this: