The Keelvar Guide to Autonomous Sourcing

Autonomous sourcing (sometimes known as automatic sourcing) is a feature of smart eSourcing platforms. It uses automation and AI-powered decision-making to handle up to 100% of the sourcing process for tail and tactical spend, while still giving your team precise controls as necessary. It reduces repetitive, low-value tasks and frees up teams to focus on strategic, high-impact sourcing work that requires human expertise.

The best autonomous sourcing fits naturally into your procurement workflow, enabling you to scale procurement across the entire organization while still maintaining compliance and competitiveness.

Here’s how autonomous sourcing works:

• Your procurement team builds custom workflows based on your business’s needs and sourcing best practices
• These workflows are triggered automatically by an agent (e.g. when inventory dips below a certain level) or as needed by a human (e.g. when someone needs to make a spot purchase)
• Once triggered, the agent takes over to invite, manage, and select suppliers from your pre-approved list
• The agent uses sourcing optimization software to make intelligent decisions based on price and non-price criteria and automatically recommends a winner or awards a contract
• If needed, the agent can also launch conditional approvals and workflows based on factors like value or location to give you extra control

All of this enables you to quickly and efficiently manage everything from repetitive, ongoing events to urgent last-minute purchase requests.

With Autonomous Sourcing from Keelvar, you can quickly create custom, repeatable workflows that scale your procurement best practices

You may also see this called intelligent, cognitive, or neural sourcing — different vendors’ terms for a similar underlying capability.

Sourcing automation and autonomous sourcing are related but not the same thing. Sourcing automation refers to automating individual tasks within a sourcing event — things like sending reminders or triggering approval steps. Autonomous sourcing is the broader capability: running an entire sourcing cycle for a category of spend with minimal human intervention, built from many individual automations working together toward one outcome.

Autonomous sourcing and autonomous procurement are related but distinct. Autonomous sourcing focuses specifically on the sourcing stage of procurement — automatically inviting suppliers to bid, evaluating responses, and recommending or awarding a winner for tail and tactical spend. Autonomous procurement is the broader term, covering automation across the full procurement cycle, from requisitioning and approvals through to invoicing and payment. In practice, autonomous sourcing is usually the best place to start: it's where the highest-volume, most repetitive decisions happen, making it the fastest way to prove out automation before extending further across the procurement process.

Comparing autonomous sourcing to traditional sourcing is like comparing a car to a bicycle. Sure, they’ll both eventually get you where you want to go—but one requires a lot more manual effort.

Traditional sourcing is reactive and labor-intensive, keeping procurement teams stuck on a treadmill of low-value, high-volume sourcing tasks. This constant workload leaves hardly any time for strategic work, like building supplier relationships, partnering with stakeholders, and creating risk mitigation strategies.

Autonomous sourcing can manage the entire sourcing cycle with little or no human intervention, while still adhering to your business’s best practices. It empowers everyone within the organization to source like experts, ensures compliance by default, and wins back hours for your procurement team to focus on the big picture.

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Traditional sourcing

• Requires labor-intensive, repetitive manual work
• Misses saving opportunities due to incorrectly implemented spending practices and lack of control over spending in other departments
• Evaluates suppliers based primarily on price
• Wastes team time monitoring the procurement process and guiding business users on best practices
• Relies on lengthy, complex policy documentation that isn’t well adopted throughout the organization
• Lack of visibility leads to rogue spending, unclear data, and stagnant processes

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Autonomous sourcing

• Automates the entire sourcing process across any type of spend
• Ensures competitive bidding and cost effectiveness in every department and all categories
• Evaluates suppliers across a range of metrics like risk, quality, sustainability, supplier diversity, and business performance to identify long-term value over short-term cost
• Empowers users across the business to make the most educated spending decisions, effortlessly enforces procurement policies, and enables your team to manage approvals efficiently
• Uses custom workflows for any category to meet specific requirements for optimal sourcing outcomes in every scenario
• Provides complete visibility and audit trails for spend categories you previously had no control over and helps you identify ways to continuously improve

Download our free ebook to learn more about autonomous sourcing→

Our Voices of Sourcing 2024 report revealed that procurement teams are under constant pressure to do more with less.

According to our research:

• 63% of procurement teams are concerned about increasing workloads
• 38% are experiencing a flat or declining workforce
• 30% are struggling with increasing demands

At the same time, only a quarter (26%) of teams planned to add staff—while a third (33%) planned to cut budgets and operate more lean.

More work + fewer resources = a tricky equation to balance. So it’s no surprise that innovative procurement teams are looking to improve efficiency so they can manage increasing demands—and over half (59%) of procurement professionals are turning to tech to help.

By adopting advanced technologies like autonomous sourcing, procurement teams can maximize their existing resources, deliver long-term business value, and scale their impact across the entire organization.

📈 Keelvar in action: How Maersk scaled sourcing excellence

Maersk uses Keelvar’s Sourcing Optimizer and Autonomous Sourcing to run 3,000+ sourcing events a year across every spend category. In their first month alone, they completed 200 RFPs—work that used to take weeks now takes days, sometimes hours. Automating the routine work freed their team to focus on supplier relationships and sustainability goals instead of manual admin.

There are certain situations where autonomous sourcing really shines. Think: repetitive events, ad hoc or urgent requests, and low-value, high-volume tasks.

Here are some great situations to use autonomous sourcing:

• Urgent or reactive purchase requests: When speed is of the essence, use pre-made workflows to instantly kick off a sourcing event and quickly identify the best supplier for faster procurement cycles
• Spot buys: Empower individuals across the business to make ad-hoc purchases while increasing visibility and compliance to bring more spend under governance 
• Mini tenders: Automatically invite relevant suppliers, ensure a competitive and compliant bidding process, and use AI-powered bid analysis to select the best outcome based on a range of criteria that matters to your business
• MRO sourcing or indirect spend: Integrate your eSourcing platform with your asset lifecycle management tool to effortlessly manage inventory and proactively manage your maintenance, repairs, and operations (MRO) sourcing

On the other hand: are there any times you shouldn’t use autonomous sourcing? 

For strategic and high-stakes sourcing events, we recommend tapping into the expertise of your human procurement team, which you can boost even further with sourcing optimization software to help them manage even the most complicated situations. This is what autonomous sourcing was made for: taking care of the simpler tasks so your team can dedicate more time and resources to the complex ones.

Getting started

Most teams start with a narrow, high-volume category like tail spend: map the existing process, build a workflow around it, test it on a small set of events, then expand to adjacent categories once the approach is proven.

There are tons of benefits of autonomous sourcing, from improving efficiency to reducing costs and boosting compliance. Here are just a few of our favorites.

1. Remove up to 100% of manual workload

With autonomous sourcing, you can completely automate the sourcing process for a range of event types—while still retaining precise controls as needed. With an intelligent agent taking care of everything from beginning to end (and following your best practices throughout), your team can spend less time on admin and more time on strategic sourcing.

2. Reduce costs and increase savings

Automation doesn’t mean sacrificing on savings. Using intelligent sourcing automation, you can ensure all purchases go through a competitive bidding process, without needing human intervention from your team. By encouraging competition between suppliers, you can get the best possible price every time, even in volatile markets.

Keelvar’s Autonomous Sourcing ensures a compliant and competitive bidding process, every time

3. Make decisions based on long-term value

Go beyond price to find the right-fit supplier that offers the best long-term value. Using an AI-powered sourcing platform like Keelvar enriches your sourcing automation with the power of sourcing optimization to consider multiple factors—like quality, risk, and sustainability—and automatically make the best sourcing decisions for your business.

4. Create repeatable workflows for any category

Use a simple no-code workflow builder to create custom automated workflows for any category. Build your best practices into each workflow, then use them again and again across the business to ensure all sourcing events effortlessly meet your team’s high standards and deliver the best results.

5. Empower business users to source like experts

Make it simple for anyone to initiate sourcing events with an intuitive, easy-to-use platform. With Keelvar’s user-friendly UI, requesters can use natural language to search for what they want, and AI does the rest—no training necessary.

Keelvar’s requester-friendly eSourcing solution lets users start automated sourcing events using natural language

6. Improve sourcing compliance

Standardize your intake forms and workflows to improve data quality and reduce manual errors. Add custom requirements or approval steps as needed to ensure you always meet your compliance requirements.

7. Centralize your sourcing data

Create a single source of truth for all sourcing activities across your organization. Gather rich data to fuel in-depth reporting, analysis, and decision-making (both automated and human). Get complete visibility and audit trails for spend categories you previously had no control over, further boosting compliance and accountability.

Centralize your data using an eSourcing platform to unlock rich reporting and get deeper insights

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Want to see how Keelvar delivers all of these benefits? Get the Autonomous Sourcing datasheet→

When you’re evaluating eSourcing platforms with autonomous sourcing capabilities, look for one that offers these sourcing automation features:

• Intelligent intake that enables requesters to use natural language when initiating sourcing events
• Supplier selection that automatically selects the best suppliers for each event
• Approval workflows that involve the right parties at the right time
• Event creation that automatically handles the necessary setup, like creating bid sheets
• Supplier communication that proactively invites suppliers to bid, monitors activity, and sends reminders as necessary (so your team doesn’t have to)
• Award recommendation based on AI-powered decision analysis that lets you make the most informed decision possible
• Reporting that visualizes your data and easily exports to your system of choice