The Agentic Procurement Diaries: Boring Enough and Safe Enough: When AI Gets the Keys

Dear Diary…

"I was watching a lot of smart people, day in and day out, looking across documents, opening folders."

My guest on this episode is Liza Tsimbal, Director of Supply Chain Management at TransAlta. TransAlta is a publicly traded power generator that has been producing electricity for more than 115 years, with more than 90 facilities in Canada, the United States, and Australia. Liza leads a team of roughly 30 people across buying and strategic sourcing. What struck me most was how disciplined she is. She refuses to let hype set the agenda.

THE INHERITANCE

Liza is emphatic that supply chain at TransAlta is not a back-office function. They are an operational one. Her team covers day-to-day procurement, outages, projects, IT, and corporate spend, and they also run complex negotiations with OEMs. She balances every call against three lenses: reliability, speed, and cost.

For about three and a half years, she has been moving the team away from being what she called "somewhat of a purchase order factory" toward category management, supplier relationships, and early engagement. She has no patience for the silos I've seen in so many organizations. Her team works cradle to grave and flexes across the portfolio, because the business doesn't care about the org chart. They want things delivered on time and on budget.

Layered on top of all this, TransAlta came through a major ERP transformation last year after roughly two and a half years of work. The company is also growing through acquisitions and development. Internal capacity is at a premium.

THE BET

Liza's bet is restraint. She told me she is deliberately avoiding AI FOMO. Her reasoning was that AI is everywhere, but scaled results are not.

So she starts with the business case. She defines the outcome first, then decides whether the answer belongs on the platform or in a point solution. Her two pilots for this year are requisition-to-purchase-order automation and contract and PO leakage. She chose them on four criteria: high volume, rules-based, a workflow nobody enjoys, and reversible if the agent gets it wrong.

There's a second reason behind the bet. TransAlta can't keep expanding the support structure every time the company grows, and supply chain talent is scarce. The goal is to strip out repetitive work so people can focus on what moves the needle.

THE AGENTIC QUESTION

Liza has a clear test for removing the human from the loop. The work must be low risk, high volume, rules-based, and reversible. She wants all four. That covers routing requests, checking completeness, matching requisitions to purchase orders, and monitoring for leakage.

She won't hand over anything that creates a new material obligation, involves a major negotiation or a critical supplier, or carries a safety implication. At the transactional end, once the work becomes "boring enough and safe enough," she believes the human can move to oversight. At the strategic end, AI should make humans better, not replace them.

Reversibility is the line she won't cross. If she can't unwind what the agent did, a person has to approve it, because she could never tell an auditor or an executive that the system did it.

THE RECEIPT

Liza was candid that the pilots haven't delivered results yet, and her team hasn't seen them. Assistive AI has already earned a place. Her team uses Copilot and other tools for contract reviews, first drafts, and scenario planning.

The pushback she has heard has mostly been reasonable: Can we trust the answer? What data is it using? Are we automating a bad process? Will there be fewer jobs? There is fear on the team, and she isn't pretending otherwise.

The concern that has stayed with me is the apprenticeship problem. If agents absorb the junior work, how does anyone build senior judgment? Liza's answer is to be deliberate about building commercial acumen and AI literacy. She also made a point I keep coming back to: sometimes clean data will beat AI.

Links:

• Liza Tsimbal on LinkedIn
• Zycus on LinkedIn
• AOP Provider Directory | Zycus
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