Key facts
| Core jobs | Requirements capture, RFQ drafting, bid comparison, approval packs |
| Scoring | Weighted criteria defined by humans and applied consistently |
| Citations | Every vendor claim links to the source document |
| Boundaries | No autonomous supplier selection or binding commitments |
| Approvals | Value thresholds route to procurement and legal owners |
| Audit | Scoring rationale, sources and decisions recorded per tender |
| Residency | Region choice plus VPC, on-prem and air-gapped deployment |
| Status | Embeddings, RAG, function calling and audit logs are live |
TL;DR
- Agents accelerate research, drafting and comparison — not selection.
- Publish weighted criteria first and make the agent apply them mechanically.
- Cite every vendor claim back to the submitted document.
- No binding commitments, no negotiations and no supplier choices by the agent.
- Keep a per-tender record of sources, scores and approvals.
How it works, step by step
- Define the requirement with stakeholders and weight the evaluation criteria up front.
- Index vendor documents, policies and past tenders for retrieval.
- Draft the RFQ and clarification questions from the requirement and criteria.
- Extract each bid into a comparable structure, citing page references.
- Score bids against the weighted criteria and record the rationale for each score.
- Flag gaps, inconsistencies and non-compliant terms for human review.
- Produce an approval pack with sources, scores and open questions for the committee.
Try it yourself
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Where procurement agents help
Procurement is document-heavy and comparison-heavy, which suits grounded agents well. Drafting RFQs from structured requirements, extracting terms from dozens of near-identical bids, building comparison tables and preparing summaries are all tasks where the model saves days without touching accountability.
The high-value output is not a recommendation; it is a transparent comparison with every claim traceable to its source. Committees can then spend their time on judgement instead of data assembly.
Scoring transparency or it does not count
- Criteria first: weights and scoring rules are human-defined and frozen before bids arrive.
- Mechanical application: the agent applies the rubric, it does not rewrite it.
- Evidence links: each score references the clause or page that justifies it.
- Gap flags: missing information is surfaced, not filled with assumptions.
- Consistency checks: identical criteria applied to every bidder alerting reviewers to anomalies.
- Versioning: criteria, bids and scores recorded per tender so the process is reproducible.
Approvals, conflicts and records
Every award above a defined value needs an authorised human decision, and conflicts of interest need explicit handling. The agent can prepare the pack and flag risks, but it should never be the system of record for the decision itself; that stays in your procurement platform with its own controls.
Keep documents and derived comparisons inside an approved boundary — vendor pricing and contracts are sensitive commercial data. Plugsky offers region choice plus VPC, on-prem and air-gapped deployment, and the live API provides embeddings, RAG, function calling and audit logging. 30+ models on one key let extraction run on a small model and analysis on a frontier one. Plans are on the live pricing page; batch endpoints, useful for large tender rounds, are coming soon.
Honest comparison
| Procurement task | Agent role | Human role | Control |
|---|---|---|---|
| Requirements | Structure and clarify | Own priorities | Sign-off on criteria |
| RFQ drafting | Draft questions and format | Approve and issue | Templated review |
| Bid extraction | Normalise into comparable fields | Spot-check | Schema validation |
| Scoring | Apply weighted rubric | Challenge and decide | Frozen criteria, citations |
| Award and negotiation | Must not act | Accountable owner | Committee approval |
Frequently asked questions
Can the agent choose a supplier?
No. Supplier selection is an accountable decision with legal and financial consequences. The agent prepares a transparent, sourced comparison for the committee.
How do we avoid biased comparisons?
Freeze weighted criteria before bids arrive, apply them mechanically, cite evidence for each score, and check for inconsistencies across bidders.
Can it negotiate terms?
It can flag non-compliant clauses and compare them to your standard terms, but negotiation and commitments belong to authorised humans.
How do we handle confidential vendor data?
Keep documents in an approved boundary, scope access per tender, avoid using vendor data for unrelated purposes, and use region-locked or on-prem deployment where required.
What if bids are in different formats?
Normalise into a common schema per tender, validate required fields and mark missing information explicitly rather than filling gaps.
How do we evaluate the agent?
Reproduce past tenders where the outcome is known and compare the agent's extracted fields, flags and scores against the expert record.
Does Plugsky support sensitive documents?
Yes. Embeddings, RAG, function calling and audit logging are live, with region choice plus VPC, on-prem and air-gapped deployment for commercial and regulated data.