Runtime Authority for Procurement
An AI agent that can raise a purchase order or approve an invoice needs the same spend authority controls the person it's assisting already operates under.
Spend authority was delegated to people, not to whatever initiates the request
Procurement already runs on delegated spend authority: category-specific limits, approval chains above certain thresholds, and separation between whoever requests a purchase and whoever approves it. These controls exist to prevent exactly the failure mode an ungoverned AI agent introduces -- spend that's technically requested correctly but outside anyone's actual authority to approve.
An AI agent raising purchase orders or flagging supplier risk doesn't remove the need for that control. It removes the natural friction -- the time it takes a person to act -- that made the control's absence tolerable before.
The same runtime, evaluating your governance
Nothing about this path changes by industry -- the same Runtime Authority engine evaluates every Intent against your own Authority Graph and Runtime Policies. What changes is whose governance it's evaluating, and what the workflow on either side of it looks like.
Where this shows up in procurement
Purchase orders
A purchase order an agent raises is evaluated against the category and amount limits actually delegated to the requesting Principal before it's issued.
Supplier onboarding
Onboarding a new supplier above a certain exposure or risk classification is routed to Human Review rather than approved automatically.
Invoice approval
An invoice an agent matches and proposes for payment is evaluated against the same approval limits a human approver would be held to.
Vendor risk
An action involving a vendor above a defined risk threshold escalates for review instead of proceeding on the agent's own assessment.
A governance document was never evaluated at the moment of action
A procurement policy document defines category limits and approval chains for humans to follow. It's never been evaluated automatically at the moment a purchase order is raised, because nothing sat between the request and the system of record to check it. Runtime Authority's Authority Graph models exactly who can commit spend, to what category, and to what extent; Runtime Policies compile the specific conditions -- amount, category, vendor risk tier -- that determine the outcome.
Every purchase order, onboarding decision, or invoice approval produces evidence at the moment it's decided, so a procurement audit doesn't depend on reconstructing intent from an email thread.
See Runtime Authority evaluate a real procurement workflow
Bring an existing approval policy from your organization. We'll show you the decision, in real time, before anything executes.