AI Intake Management will assist 70% of Purchase Requisitions by 2027

Intake management—the process of receiving, assessing, and prioritizing procurement requests—is the first step in many procurement processes, setting the stage for sourcing, contracting, and purchasing activities. While the technical capability to collect information using forms has existed since the emergence of the first e-procurement solutions, it has never been fully integrated into the stakeholder engagement process. Stakeholders simply hate dealing with clunky procurement-centered applications.

With complex supply chains, stringent regulatory requirements, and increased cost pressure defining today's procurement landscape, absent or form-based intake approaches are becoming a liability. The current business environment demands smarter solutions that help streamline processes, ensure compliance, enhance decision-making, and align procurement activities with organizational goals and strategies. And we live in 2025, so user experience is key for adoption.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming procurement by automating manual tasks, providing real-time insights, and enhancing strategic decision-making. When it comes to intake management, AI has the potential to improve efficiency, minimize errors, and increase transparency, ultimately improving stakeholder satisfaction and process compliance. This article explores current challenges in intake management and explains how AI can help transform the process.  

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Current Challenges in Intake Management

Traditional stakeholder engagement processes and forms for demand capturing (if either existed to start with) present several challenges for procurement teams that hinder efficient intake management. Key challenges include:

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• Absence of a defined intake process: Many organizations have no clearly defined process for engaging procurement. Referencing the intranet page is rarely enough to inform and engage stakeholders early on in their process or to ensure they comply with procurement, risk, or data security policies.

• Static forms: If forms exist, independent of intake, free text, sourcing, contract, or supplier requests, they are usually generic and static. As forms need to be defined and built, it takes effort to design, approve, and build them. And now keep them up to date.  

• Time-consuming and error-prone process: Traditional intake management relies heavily on manual data entry and communication via email or paper forms, which is time-consuming and prone to errors.  

• Poor input quality: Many users don’t understand why certain information is important for procurement and, therefore, provide incomplete details. Is ‘Other” really a category?  

• Inconsistent information: Many organizations use multiple types of request forms in different formats, resulting in inconsistent information being captured. This inconsistency, combined with missing details, complicates the processing of requests. Remember the point on static forms? Right.

• Poor user experience: Intake forms are often very static and provide little explanation or rationale for the required information. After submitting requests, it is also cumbersome to keep track of the request status, resulting in an ‘unsatisfactory’ user experience. The word ‘painful’ comes to mind.

• Limited visibility: Traditional methods lack a unified platform for managing requests, making it challenging to track and prioritize them effectively. This results in poor visibility into procurement activities, making it difficult to identify bottlenecks. Like with other things that sound too good to be true, Guided Buying doesn’t deliver on the promise. Especially as most multi-ERP and multi-country organizations have teams not covered by the central system.

• Inefficiencies and delays: Manual processes result in extended processing cycle times, which can lead to delays in project timelines and negatively impact overall business performance due to missed deadlines. When was the last time you complained about ‘late involvement’?  

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How can AI Transform Intake Management?

According to Gartner’s Innovation Insight: Procurement Intake Management Boost End-User Engagement, 70% of intake requests will be assisted by AI and generative AI technologies by 2027. Use cases for AI in intake management include:  

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Streamlining Request Submission and Tracking

AI-driven intake management solutions provide stakeholders with a unified entry point into procurement. They enable a single-platform solution where employees can submit requests and track their status in real-time. A single point of entry improves efficiency and accuracy by reducing the need for interactions with multiple applications.  

Combined with workflows, this can span multiple departments and address topics like risk management, IT security checks, and others that Procurement got handed because they were the guardian of external relationships.

Guiding Employees and Ensuring Compliance

AI-powered tools, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, can help employees navigate procurement processes more easily. AI tools can provide employees with tailored suggestions based on their roles and past purchasing behaviors, while also checking requests in real-time against organizational policies and regulations to ensure compliance and reduce risk. Basically, GenAI makes forms irrelevant.

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Automating Request Processing

AI can help procurement teams automate request processing in a few ways. You define the criteria once; the system takes care of the rest.  

• Automatic data enrichment: AI fills in missing information, ensuring requests are complete and reducing errors and rework. Where information is missing, it simply asks for it.

• Automated categorization: NLP helps categorize requests.  

• AI-driven routing: AI automatically directs requests to the appropriate teams or individuals for triage, thereby reducing manual intervention.

• Automated approvals: AI can automate and streamline the purchase approval process.

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Benefits of AI-driven Intake Management  

With AI, organizations can significantly enhance the efficiency of their intake management process, as highlighted above. Improved intake management efficiency can yield various benefits, as noted by Gartner in its Innovation Insight: Procurement Intake Management Boost End-User Engagement. These benefits include:  

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• Procurement demand aggregation: Efficient intake management streamlines the collection of procurement requests, enabling bulk purchasing and strategic planning by providing insights into procurement demand.

• High user satisfaction: Intake management solutions simplify the procurement process with a single, intuitive interface, enhancing user experience and encouraging adoption by removing friction from the request process.

• Improved cycle times: Intake management accelerates approval times and cycle conversions by automating workflows and gathering necessary information upfront.

• Simplified change management: Consolidating stakeholder training into a single intake process simplifies change management by reducing the need for training on multiple procurement solutions or processes.

• Scalability: Intake management solutions help organizations scale efficiently by handling increased procurement requests without overburdening their limited resources.

Streamlining intake management is only the start of what procurement teams can achieve with AI. Combining AI-driven intake management with other AI use cases, such as autonomous sourcing and negotiations, can drive further process efficiencies by giving stakeholders autonomy over the process of running tactical sourcing events with preferred vendors or automating negotiations with single vendors for below-threshold purchases.

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Leveraging a platform that supports the combination of multiple AI use cases enables procurement to explore the end-to-end automation of many operational processes, while increasing process compliance and generating savings in non-strategic purchases.

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Generative Intake Management by Procure Ai

​Procure Ai's Generative Intake solution leverages AI to create streamlined intake and buying experiences that guide and delight your stakeholders with dialog-based AI. By leveraging chat, real-time catalog checks, and natural language processing capabilities, we can instantly interpret and assess user requests against existing buying channels and internal policies. Using LLM, we facilitate human-like interactions that ensure requirements are understood, blanks filled, and requests are efficiently structured, categorized, and processed.  

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By turning unstructured free-text requisitions into structured requests and Scope of Work documents, Procure Ai’s Generative Intake solution eliminates the need for complex forms, supports the execution of category and supplier strategies, and optimizes source utilization in Purchasing. Additionally, AI assists in drafting statements of work or RFQs within seconds based on analyzed requests, reducing rework rates by up to 78%, and enabling downstream automations with autonomous sourcing and negotiations of tactical requests.  

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The platform also offers chat-based procurement guidance, tapping into knowledge repositories like Confluence or SharePoint, and integrates seamlessly with systems such as Microsoft Teams, ERPs, or e-procurement platforms, thereby enhancing the accuracy and flexibility of requisition management.

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Make Generative Intake Management a Reality

Effective intake management is the cornerstone of a well-orchestrated procurement process, ensuring that organizational goals are met through streamlined, compliant, and efficient operations. However, traditional manual processes often hinder this objective. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into intake management offers a powerful solution to these challenges. By streamlining request submissions, guiding users through the process, and automating request processing, AI can help organizations achieve efficient intake management and reap its associated benefits.  

Choosing a procurement automation platform, like Procure Ai, enables organizations to extend the benefits of Generative Intake Management into downstream processes like tactical sourcing and negotiations or P2P operations to achieve end-to-end automation.

Are you ready to transform your intake management process with the help of AI? Contact us to learn more about Procure Ai’s user-friendly Generative Intake Management solution and how it supports end-to-end procurement automation.