How Agentic AI is Transforming Tail Spend

Tail spend is typically 20% of total spend. But it takes up a significant proportion of procurement's time, headcount, and energy.

Hundreds of transactions. Thousands of line items. Each one small enough to feel trivial. Each one needing just enough human involvement to make it impossible to ignore.

Your best people are chasing approvals on £200 orders. Processing invoices manually. Reconciling exceptions for suppliers who aren't even on contract. Not because it's the best use of their time. Because that’s how it's always been done.

That's the real cost of tail spend. Not the spend itself. The resource it takes to manage the chaos it creates.

AI is built for exactly this. High volume. Repetitive decisions. Clear rules. 88% of procurement executives are open to AI-powered agents handling small-value negotiations (The Hackett Group, 2025). Some teams are already there. The rest are still doing it the hard way. Which one are you?

When systems execute instead of advise, everything changes. No more waiting for human sign-off on every step. The RFQ runs. The policy enforces. The payment routes. The loop closes.

Join Alistair Cane, Co-founder of Axiom, alongside Xavier Olivera and Elizabeth Zucker from The Hackett Group for a 60-minute session that makes the case and shows it in practice.

Tuesday 19 May | 3:00pm BST / 10:00am EDT

What you'll take away:

• Why tail spend consumes far more resource than its value justifies, and what to do about it

• Why tail spend is the highest-value place to deploy AI in procurement right now

• Where AI is genuinely delivering ROI, and where it's still theatre

• What it looks like when your procurement system stops advising and starts doing