For most teams, visibility ends once an order is placed. Shipment status lives in a carrier portal that nobody checks consistently. Delivery issues don't surface until someone follows up, or worse, until they've already become a bigger problem. Supplier pricing lives in a spreadsheet someone built two years ago, which no one fully trusts anymore. The transaction is complete, but the intelligence surrounding it is scattered across various locations. If Workday is where your business runs — financials, supplier records, approval workflows — why isn’t that where your order information lives, too? 

That's the gap Purchasing Copilot was built to close: AI purchasing agents for Workday that monitor order activity, surface what needs attention, and put the right information in front of you when you need it most.

The cost of not knowing

Post-order blindness has a real operational cost. When an order is late or unaccounted for, the first thing that happens is someone sends a message. A location manager pings the purchasing team. The purchasing team logs into a carrier portal to find an answer that should already be visible. Status gets relayed back. If there's an issue, the cycle starts over. It's a time drain for everyone involved — and it's entirely avoidable. The better version isn't faster status checks. It's a system that surfaces the information before anyone has to ask.

Another common challenge: a delivery failure goes unresolved for days because the alert is sent to an inbox nobody monitors closely. By the time someone catches it, the impact has already cascaded: a location is short on supplies, a team is improvising, and what started as a fulfillment exception has become an operational problem that takes twice as long to untangle as it would have to prevent.

Finally, there's spend that quietly bleeds out through inaction. Purchasing admins are busy placing orders, fielding questions, and keeping things moving. They buy from the suppliers they know, in the quantities that are easiest to order, because that's what gets the job done. Nobody has time to audit whether a different pack size or an equivalent SKU would cost meaningfully less. The savings are available, but the bandwidth isn't. 

Every organization runs these processes a little differently. The tools, workflows, and people responsible vary. But the bottom line is the same: if your order intelligence isn't living in Workday and being surfaced to you automatically, it isn't working as well as it could be.

Why agentic purchasing is different

Teams have tried to solve post-order visibility before: shared spreadsheets, carrier portal bookmarks, weekly check-in emails with vendors, etc. The problem isn't that those tools are bad; it's that they all require someone to go find the problem. Someone has to remember to pull the report, log into the portal, or ask the question.

Agents work the other way around. You're not getting better visibility into the same manual process — you're replacing the manual process with one that runs in the background and comes to you.

That's what agentic procurement means in practice: the system does the work of staying informed, so your team doesn't have to.

Purchasing Copilot: Order.co’s new AI purchasing intelligence in Workday

Purchasing Copilot is an AI-powered app, now available in the Workday Marketplace, that brings order intelligence into your team’s source of truth.

Purchasing Copilot is built on top of Order.co’s Bring All Purchasing Into Workday, which simplifies supplier access and drives PO-backed purchasing inside Workday. Purchasing Copilot handles everything that comes next — giving you the full picture for every order, every vendor, every transaction, directly inside Workday. No new dashboards to log in to, no data living elsewhere.

Three purpose-built agents each target a different place where purchasing intelligence typically breaks down.

Shipment Tracking Agent

The Shipment Tracking Agent aggregates real-time status and delivery data across all orders and carriers and surfaces it inside Workday. You see what's in transit, what's arriving soon, and what's changed — with AI-generated summaries tied back to the original PO. No carrier portal logins or email chains. The status is already there when you open Workday.

Savings Agent

The Savings Agent analyzes your purchasing history and identifies products for which a lower-cost alternative exists, typically a different pack size or an equivalent SKU at a better unit price. It shows you what you're currently buying, what the alternative is, the price difference, and projected savings over time. 

Alerts Agent*

The Alerts Agent monitors orders for exceptions — delivery failed, available for pickup, needs attention — and surfaces them proactively in Workday. Each alert includes a description of the item and the PO it's tied to, so you don't have to decode order numbers to figure out what actually needs to happen. The goal isn't just visibility. It's eliminating the lag between something going wrong and someone knowing about it.

What changes when purchasing intelligence lives in Workday

Purchasing Copilot doesn't just make individual tasks easier. It changes the baseline of what your team knows, and when they know it. Status is visible before anyone has to ask. Exceptions surface before they cascade. Savings opportunities don't disappear into the noise of a busy week. The information that used to require someone to go find it is already there — in Workday, where your team works — and that changes how everyone from buyers to leadership operates day to day.

See Purchasing Copilot in action

Purchasing intelligence shouldn't live in carrier portals, inboxes, and spreadsheets. It should be in Workday, working for you before you know you need it. See what that looks like for your team and schedule a demo today.

Purchasing Copilot was developed in partnership with Kainos — a leading Workday services and technology partner — as part of the Built on Workday Partner Program. It's available now on the Workday Marketplace.

*Enhanced Alerts Agent coming soon.