The process nobody has fixed
Procurement leaders have modernised a lot. Vendor onboarding isn't usually one of them.
The standard process at most large enterprises still looks like this: buyer sends an email, vendor fills a form and uploads documents, someone checks every document manually, the same data gets re-entered into the ERP by hand, someone else chases approvals through a chain that wasn't designed for speed. If nothing went wrong — days or weeks later, the vendor is onboarded.
It's slow, it's error-prone, and the parts most likely to fail are the manual ones.
What the AI-first version looks like
We're rebuilding this process for a Fortune 500 client right now. Here's how it works.
The buyer sends the vendor a secure invitation link. The vendor uploads their documents once — registration certificates, PAN, bank details, director information, whatever the onboarding requires.
Then AI takes over
It reads every document, extracts the relevant data — PAN, GSTIN, bank details, company name, director information — and cross-validates it across documents automatically. It verifies the data against government platforms in real time and flags any mismatches before a human ever opens the file.
The form fills itself. The vendor reviews, corrects if needed, and submits.
The approval workflow then triggers automatically — right people, right sequence, full audit trail. Once approved, the ERP is updated in real time. The vendor is notified instantly.
What used to take days or weeks now takes hours. What used to require manual effort now requires human judgment — which is a different thing entirely.
"What used to take days or weeks now takes hours. What used to require manual effort now requires human judgment. That distinction is where the real value lives."
What we didn't touch
The client's ERP is unchanged.
No rip and replace. No systems migration. No disruption to existing infrastructure or the teams that run it. The AI layer sits on top of what's already there — making it faster, smarter, and less dependent on human effort for the steps that don't need it.
This is the pattern that works in large enterprises: augment what exists, don't replace it. The value appears in weeks, not years.
Deepak's Take
Vendor onboarding is one of those processes that every enterprise knows is broken and almost nobody has prioritised fixing — because it's operational, unglamorous, and sits across multiple functions with no single clear owner.
It's also exactly the kind of process where agentic AI delivers fast, measurable ROI. The inputs are structured documents. The validation rules are defined. The workflow logic already exists. AI doesn't need to invent a new process — it just needs to take over the parts that humans are doing manually because nobody built a better alternative.
If your vendor onboarding still runs on email chains and manual data entry, the better version isn't a future state. It's available now.
Deepak Choithramani is Co-Founder of Vishleshan AI Solutions. He writes about enterprise AI, agentic systems, and what it actually takes to go from pilot to production.
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