Ep 03: The Agentic Procurement Diaries: Boring Enough and Safe Enough: When AI Gets the Keys

Dear Diary… "I was watching a lot of smart people, day in and day out, looking across documents, opening folders."

Most procurement teams pick AI use cases by asking what the technology can do. Liza Tsimbal started somewhere else. On a random Tuesday, an OEM technical issue had a room full of smart people hunting through old drawings, contracts, and email chains for one piece of information. Her conclusion: information you cannot retrieve fast enough might as well not exist.

Liza is the Director of Supply Chain Management at TransAlta, one of Canada's biggest power generators. She leads a team of roughly 30 people across buying and strategic sourcing that supports more than 90 generating facilities in Canada, the United States, and Australia.

In this episode of The Agentic Procurement Diaries podcast, Philip Ideson and Liza discuss:

- Why TransAlta chose requisition-to-purchase-order automation and contract and PO leakage as its first agentic pilots, based on four criteria: high volume, rules-based, disliked by the team, and reversible

- Liza's test for taking the human out of the loop, and the decisions she won't hand to an agent, such as new material obligations or anything with a safety implication

- How she avoids AI FOMO by tying every use case to a measurable business outcome

- The risk of automating procurement's apprenticeship, and why the ability to define what good looks like becomes the scarce skill

Links:

Liza Tsimbal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liza-tsimbal-mba-59433242/

Zycus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/zycus/

AOP Provider Directory | Zycus: https://artofprocurement.com/provider-directory/zycusinc