Use case · Cost control
Spend is modelled by vendor and category, a monitor flags overruns, and a Relay drafts the renegotiation for a buyer to approve.
An illustrative procurement and cost control use case for Agent Serve, the AI workspace where teams build, deploy, and manage AI agents: the semantic model, Monitors, a Relay, Dashboards and Tables combine to track spend and prepare renegotiations.
At a glance
The problem it removes
Spend sits in several systems with different vendor names. Overruns show up when the invoice arrives, and preparing a renegotiation means rebuilding the same spreadsheet every quarter.
Step by step
Vendors, contracts and cost centers relate the same way in every analysis.
A monitor on spend versus budget alerts when a category runs hot.
A Relay compares rates and drafts the renegotiation for a buyer to approve.
How it fits together
Vendors, contracts, categories and cost centers, joined the same way everywhere.
A monitor on spend versus budget alerts when a category runs hot.
A Relay compares rates across contracts and drafts the renegotiation email.
The spend dashboard tracks committed and realized savings by category.
How it runs
Agent Serve reads spend through one model, so the alert, the dashboard and the Relay all count the same way.
Vendors, contracts, invoices and cost centers become entities in the semantic model, joined by checked relationships.
A Metric threshold monitor on spend against budget raises a Warning when a category goes over.
A Relay starts on When a monitor alerts, compares rates across contracts and drafts the renegotiation email.
The email waits as an approval showing the exact message before it goes to the vendor.
What to measure
Example figures for a procurement team managing a few hundred vendors.
−7%
Addressable spend
Savings from renegotiated contracts.
3 wks
Earlier warning
Overspend flagged before month end.
85%
Spend under management
Spend mapped to a contract and owner.
0
Unreviewed vendor emails
Every message waits for a buyer.
Illustrative example. Figures show how the workflow is measured; they are not customer results.
In depth
Agent Serve lets a buyer test terms, set the Relay’s limits, approve the email and ask follow-up questions in one place.
Agent Serve dashboard scenarios recalculate outcomes as a buyer changes price, term or volume, kept apart from recorded results.
An Agent Serve Relay’s Permissions step decides what it may do alone, what needs approval and what is blocked.
The Agent Serve Relay shows the buyer the exact email it wants to send to the vendor. Nothing goes out until it is approved.
Buyers attach the spend table in Agent Serve Chat and ask which vendors grew fastest this quarter, with a chart.
Examples
Three spend reviews financial services procurement teams run on Agent Serve, each ending with a person’s approval.
An Agent Serve monitor tracks software and market data spend against budget, and a Relay lists renewals due in the next quarter.
An Agent Serve rule scores each supplier invoice against the agreed rate card, and a monitor alerts on a run of outliers.
An Agent Serve dashboard breaks fees down by scheme and region, with conformed dimensions lining up regions from billing and finance.
Examples show what teams can build in Agent Serve. They describe patterns, not named customer deployments.
Before and after
| Work | Before | With Agent Serve |
|---|---|---|
| Seeing overspend | BeforeFound when the quarter’s invoices are reconciled. | With Agent ServeA monitor raises an alert when a category passes its budget. |
| Joining spend data | BeforeVendor names matched by hand across billing and finance exports. | With Agent ServeA semantic model joins vendors, contracts and cost centers once. |
| Building the case | BeforeAn analyst compares contracts in a spreadsheet for days. | With Agent ServeA Relay compares rates and drafts the email for a buyer. |
| Talking to vendors | BeforeEmails sent from personal inboxes with no record. | With Agent ServeEvery email approved first and kept in the audit log. |
Governance
Agent Serve keeps vendor contact behind approvals and keeps cost data scoped to the people who own it.
Security and governanceAgent Serve reports match rate, duplicate keys and orphan keys for each relationship before you mark it verified.
Saving the Agent Serve semantic model and verifying relationships needs write or admin access.
Relays never send email or book meetings without an approval, under any autonomy setting. An approval covers the exact payload the reviewer saw and expires if nobody decides.
Proposals, approvals, declines and executed actions are written to the workspace audit log, which admins can export.
Row-level policies narrow what each person sees in tables, dashboards, exports and scheduled reports.
Admin, write and read roles per workspace, plus permission groups that limit which models, blocks and integrations a team can use.
Further reading
When finance, risk and the business each compute the same ratio their own way, the board pack argues with itself. Here is a setup where every dashboard reads one governed definition, and drift is caught before the next meeting.
Risk and finance data · 13 min readThe morning spreadsheet is out of date before the meeting starts, and two people bring two RTO numbers. This playbook moves daily decisions onto dashboards that refresh every 15 minutes or query live, with one definition per number.
Ecommerce leadership · 5 min readMost D2C teams still start the day by stitching a Shopify export, a courier report and two ad accounts together in Excel. Here is a dashboard that fills itself as orders land and tells the team when something moves.
Fashion & D2C · 6 min readQuestions
In Agent Serve Tables. The semantic model maps each entity to a workspace table, so invoices and contracts are imported or synced into tables first.
No. An Agent Serve Relay never sends email without a person approving the exact message, and you can limit recipients to an allowlist.
Yes. Agent Serve row-level security narrows what each person sees in tables, dashboards, exports and scheduled reports.
No. The figures are illustrative examples of what a procurement team might measure with Agent Serve, not customer results.
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