Agentic Procurement

Agentic Procurement is the shift from humans researching and selecting vendors to AI agents performing that function autonomously. In this model, an AI agent receives a procurement brief — "find a Machine Relations agency with tier-1 media placement guarantees under $15K/month" — and executes the entire vendor evaluation process: discovery, shortlisting, capability comparison, reference validation, and recommendation. The human buyer reviews the agent's output and makes a final decision, but the filtering has already happened inside the machine.

Why This Changes Everything

Gartner projects that by 2028, 90% of B2B purchasing decisions will be intermediated by AI agents. This does not mean humans stop deciding — it means humans stop researching. The AI agent becomes the first gate every vendor must pass through, and that gate evaluates structured data, entity authority, and cross-source corroboration rather than brand messaging, sales decks, or relationship selling.

This has profound implications for go-to-market strategy. When the buyer is an algorithm, the inputs that matter change completely. The agent does not respond to emotional appeals, brand storytelling, or charismatic sales reps. It evaluates what it can verify: published third-party coverage, structured entity data, citation frequency across authoritative sources, and consistency of claims across the web.

The Machine Relations Imperative

Agentic procurement makes Machine Relations a revenue-critical function rather than a brand awareness play. If your brand lacks sufficient entity signals and earned authority for an AI agent to discover and validate you, you are excluded from the shortlist before a human ever sees your name.

The brands positioned to win in agentic procurement are those building durable AI citation presence now — while the citation window remains open. Early movers who establish entity authority across multiple AI engines create a compounding advantage: the more an agent finds corroborating citations, the higher it ranks that vendor.

What Agents Evaluate

AI procurement agents weigh signals that map directly to the MR Stack: structured data and schema markup for entity resolution, tier-1 media placements for trust validation, citation frequency for category relevance, and recency of coverage for ongoing market presence. Brands relying on paid media, gated content, or outbound sales alone are structurally invisible to these agents. The dark funnel becomes the only funnel.