User Experience Drives Adoption
Procurement transformation often fails when it is treated primarily as an IT project. A system may technically work, but if the buying experience remains complex, employees will continue using emails, spreadsheets, and manual workarounds.
For Shaz Khan, successful modernisation begins with making enterprise purchasing intuitive, approachable, and easy to trust, while preserving the control and compliance procurement teams require.
AI Automates Tasks, Not Judgment
AI is already creating value by interpreting invoices, matching purchase orders, detecting spend anomalies, and executing structured tasks. But negotiation, supplier risk, contractual decisions, and exceptions still require human judgment.
In this ERP News Q&A, Shaz Khan, Co-Founder and CEO of Vroozi, discusses SAP clean core, procurement adoption, consumer-grade user experiences, AI governance, and why ERP’s future role may be smaller—but more focused—as intelligent applications reshape enterprise purchasing.
Why Procurement Transformation Still Falls Short
Q: Procurement transformation has been on the enterprise agenda for years, yet many organizations still struggle with fragmented processes, manual work, and low user adoption. Why has meaningful procurement modernization proved so difficult to achieve?
A: Most procurement transformations start as IT projects instead of user experience projects. Companies buy a system, roll it out, and expect behavior to change because the tool changed. But employees have been trained to use consumer apps and expect something intuitive and flexible. When the new procurement system still feels like the old one underneath a new login screen with hundreds of data fields, they will find ways to work around it. That’s when you end up with fragmented, manual workarounds companies were trying to eliminate in the first place.
Q: As more SAP customers embrace clean core principles, how is this changing the way organizations think about procurement technology and the role of applications that sit alongside the ERP?
A: Clean core has forced a healthier and long-overdue conversation: leverage the standard capabilities and add-ons in the ERP platform. For years, procurement complexity got absorbed into SAP through custom code, and every upgrade became a renegotiation and litigation with your own history. Now IT teams are drawing a harder line: SAP stays standardized, and the buying experience, workflows, and supplier catalogs live in a layer built and personalized for that job. Mega-processes that are fundamental to an organization, such as procure-to-pay and settle-to-close, become digitally integrated across a standardized platform, resulting in a much lower total cost of ownership and faster ROI.
Q: There is often tension between keeping the ERP core standardized and giving procurement teams the flexibility they need to respond to changing business requirements. How can organizations strike the right balance without creating another layer of technology complexity?
A: The balance comes from connecting to SAP instead of living inside it. Vroozi sits alongside S/4HANA, ECC, or SRM through a snap-on, API architecture, so SAP stays the system of record, and we handle the integration and process points that change constantly, like approval paths, compliance checks, and supplier catalogs. The complexity still exists; it just moves to an interface layer that was built to handle and orchestrate change instead of one that penalizes it.
The balance comes from connecting to SAP instead of living inside it.
— Shaz Khan, Co-Founder and CEO, Vroozi
Making Enterprise Purchasing Work for Users
Q: Procurement systems have traditionally been designed around process and control, while employees increasingly expect consumer-like digital experiences. How important has user experience become to the success of enterprise procurement transformation?
A: It’s become the whole ballgame. I’ve said before that we want procurement to feel like the Louis Vuitton of purchasing experiences. That’s less about polish for its own sake and more about the feeling of effortlessness, approachability, and trust that comes with a well-designed product. Control and compliance still matter, but if the experience is clunky, people will work around the system, and none of the control articulated in procurement policy handbooks matters anymore.
Q: Many procurement initiatives look successful from an implementation perspective but struggle to achieve adoption across the business. What separates organizations that successfully change purchasing behavior from those that simply deploy new technology?
A: The organizations that succeed measure adoption, not just go-live dates. They watch whether organizational spend is actually flowing through the platform, whether employees are searching catalogs instead of emailing a manager for contracts, whether exceptions for invoices and payment delays are dropping over time. Going live tells you the system works. Watching those numbers for the next six months tells you whether people actually changed how they buy.
Going live tells you the system works. Watching those numbers for the next six months tells you whether people actually changed how they buy.
— Shaz Khan, Co-Founder and CEO, Vroozi
Where AI Delivers Value and Where Judgment Remains Essential
Q: AI is rapidly becoming embedded across procurement and accounts payable. Where do you see AI delivering meaningful value today, and where do you think expectations are running ahead of what the technology can realistically deliver?
A: I have found that AI is excellent in three areas: intelligent document processing, additive data for decision-making, and structured task execution. Reading and interpreting invoices, matching purchase orders, flagging anomalies in spend data, executing an inventory check. Where expectations run ahead is judgment. AI eliminates tedious tasks, but it also reveals gaps you didn’t know existed, and a category manager still has to decide what those gaps mean for a supplier relationship or a budget. That part hasn’t gone anywhere.
Q: As AI moves from recommendations and copilots toward more autonomous agents, which procurement and finance processes are most likely to become increasingly automated, and where will human judgment remain essential?
A: The high-volume, low-ambiguity transactions — routine reorders, standard invoice matching, low-dollar-value catalog-based purchases — are the areas ready for more autonomy. The introduction of AI agents creates a supercharged environment that can augment the workforce. Human judgment stays essential anywhere there’s negotiation, risk, or a relationship involved: new supplier onboarding, contract terms, exceptions that don’t fit the pattern. That’s not a line I see moving anytime soon.
Human judgment stays essential anywhere there’s negotiation, risk, or a relationship involved.
— Shaz Khan, Co-Founder and CEO, Vroozi
Building Trust in Autonomous Procurement
Q: Greater AI-driven automation also raises questions around governance, explainability, and financial control. What safeguards should finance and procurement leaders put in place as AI begins to influence or execute purchasing decisions?
A: Every AI-driven action in procurement needs a clear audit trail back to a policy, not just an output. Leaders should be able to answer why an agent approved or flagged something, in plain language, at any point. I’d also push back on the idea that autonomy has to mean invisibility. The best safeguard is keeping AI decisions visible and reversible until the organization has enough history with the system to trust it further.
Q: ERP has traditionally been the central system of record for enterprise transactions. As specialized platforms and AI-driven applications take on more of the user experience, workflow, and decision-making layer, how do you see the relationship between ERP and procurement technology evolving?
A: I think the ERP’s job gets smaller, and that’s the right direction. It stays the system of record for financials and master data, no argument there. But enterprise search, predictive analytics, workflow, the AI-assisted parts, those belong in layers that can be rebuilt in weeks instead of waiting for an ERP release cycle. One system trying to execute all business processes will gradually give way to self-service prompts that will intelligently assign tasks across a company’s application ecosystem.
The Next Chapter of Procurement Transformation
Q: Looking ahead three to five years, what will distinguish organizations that genuinely transform procurement from those that simply digitize existing processes? And what should procurement, finance, and IT leaders be prioritizing today to prepare for that shift?
A: Three to five years out, I think the split comes down to whether a company changed how people actually buy or just changed what software they click through to do the same thing. A lot of “digital transformation” over the last decade has been the second one. What leaders should be doing now is less about picking the next AI feature and more about getting their data and their enterprise application architecture in order, because I’ve seen plenty of companies bolt on impressive AI tools that end up guessing at bad data underneath. The tool gets smarter. The output doesn’t.
The tool gets smarter. The output doesn’t.
— Shaz Khan, Co-Founder and CEO, Vroozi
ERP News Editorial Team
The ERPNews Editorial Team covers global developments in ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), enterprise software, cloud platforms, AI, automation, and digital transformation, providing independent news and editorial analysis for senior business and technology leaders. Our reporting focuses on market signals, strategic shifts, and enterprise impact across the ERP and enterprise technology ecosystem.
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