January 28, 2026
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Most procurement teams today are dealing with a problem no software vendor wants to admit:
Business users don’t log into procurement systems.
It doesn’t matter how clean the UI looks in a demo. If someone has to log into Coupa or Ariba to get something done, the process stalls. Intake gets misrouted, approvers answer in email, dashboards go untouched, and eventually someone in procurement has to step in and manually push things along.
Over time, that becomes the real workflow design: Smart people acting as middleware.
The goal is not to replace your suite. It’s to finally make it usable.
And the outcome is simple: Make procurement easier for everyone, especially the business.
Virtually every company has adopted some form of modern procurement suite. These platforms solve the compliance problem on paper. In reality, adoption breaks down at the same predictable points:
This is not a training issue. It’s a behavior issue.
People live in Slack, Teams, email, Jira, Salesforce - the places where actual work happens. Every time you force them into a separate portal, you create friction. And friction compounds.
Suites assumed adoption.
The future stack assumes the opposite.
If you shadow any procurement team for a week, you’ll see the same thing: a huge amount of time spent on tasks that exist solely because systems don’t talk well to each other.
Examples:
Most teams don’t call this out directly, but it’s the tax that slows everything down.
It’s also the biggest opportunity.
The next generation of procurement tech won’t win because it has better dashboards or more modules. It will win because it eliminates this glue-work and gets procurement back to the actual work: strategy, negotiations, supplier performance, and risk.
Dashboards have become the industry’s default solution to almost every problem. The assumption is:
“If we build a dashboard, people will look at it and make better decisions.”
But here’s what actually happens:
Most dashboards sit unused.
Not because they’re bad. Because dashboards require effort:
Most people don’t operate that way. They respond to prompts, not dashboards.
The future stack shifts from “places to go” to “moments of action.”
It moves insights into the workflow instead of asking people to go find them somewhere else.
The key architectural change underway is simple:
The suite remains the system of record, but stops being the system of work.
Instead, an intelligent coordination layer sits on top and handles:
This lets the suite do what it’s good at - structured data, approvals, financial controls - without forcing business users through its interface.
The new reality:
It’s not a replacement strategy.
It’s a leverage strategy.
Forget the hype for a moment. When you strip away every buzzword, agentic orchestration really comes down to this:
Software that notices something, understands what it means, and takes the next step without waiting for a human.
That includes:
It’s not about replacing procurement.
It’s about automating everything that shouldn’t require human judgment.
Renewals are one of the clearest examples of where systems fall apart.
CLMs already send renewal notifications. But the pattern is universal:
Everyone ignores the first five emails.
It’s like compliance e-training.
You get the first reminder: ignore.
The second: ignore.
The third: ignore.
The fourth: maybe later.
Then you get the final email:
“Your manager has been notified.”
Suddenly everyone completes their training.
CLM notifications suffer from the same behavioral problem: people act only when they have to - and by then, the renewal window is gone.
A smarter approach is what Astra’s Renewal Planner does:
The business doesn’t have to log into anything.
Procurement doesn’t have to chase anyone.
And renewals stop being last-minute emergencies.
You don’t need a multi-year transformation program to modernize your stack. The next 12–24 months can be very straightforward:
Make Slack/Teams the front door.
Stop forcing portal adoption. Bring the process to where people already are.
Automate intake routing.
Most misalignment issues vanish once intake is handled correctly.
Trigger projects automatically from renewals.
The fastest operational win.
Put insights inside the workflow.
No more dashboards as the primary surface.
Automate vendor and requester follow-ups.
Cycle time drops immediately.
None of this requires ripping out your suite.
It just requires adding the right layer above it.
Looking a bit further out (but still realistic), you’ll see:
Again, nothing sci-fi. The components already exist. Adoption is the lagging factor.
What Astra Actually Is (In Practical Terms)
Astra is Valorant’s procurement orchestration platform that sits above your existing systems and takes over the coordination work they were never designed to handle. It connects Slack/Teams, intake workflows, sourcing triggers, renewals, vendor interactions, and your suite (Coupa/Ariba/NetSuite) so the business doesn’t have to jump between tools. It’s not a new portal, and it’s not another dashboard. It’s the layer that makes the rest of the stack usable.
Astra is designed to support exactly this architecture.
Not as another place to log into, but as the coordination layer that sits above your existing systems.
In practical terms, Astra:
1. Turns Slack/Teams into the procurement workspace
No portals. No “where do I go for this?” problems.
2. Cleans up intake before it reaches procurement
Better routing = less chaos.
3. Automates renewal workflows
The process starts on time, every time.
4. Keeps your suite as the system of record
Procurement stops fighting the system and starts leveraging it.
Astra doesn’t replace anything.
It makes everything else work better.
If you want to move toward this model without losing momentum:
This is the simplest, most pragmatic path to a modern procurement stack.
The future of procurement tech is not a new suite or a bigger portal.
It’s a shift in architecture and expectations:
Agentic platforms aren’t replacing procurement.
They’re replacing the glue-work that’s been dragging procurement down.
That’s the actual future - and it’s entirely achievable.
If you want a clear view of how your current architecture should evolve, engage Valorant for a Procurement Tech Stack Audit.
