The Missing Orchestration Layer: How Coupa’s Acquisition of Tonkean is Wiring the New Agentic Enterprise Together

The ERP isn’t going away, but it’s being demoted. There is a new enterprise landscape emerging and with the acquisition of Tonkean, we have an enterprise-wide agentic orchestration layer that will unlock tremendous value in this new world. Let me briefly explain why.

There is a massive enterprise technology shift underway right now, and we're embracing the responsibility of driving it and defining what comes next. The strategy of running one monolithic, horizontally integrated ERP — with one vendor serving all functions — is being replaced. In its place are vertical, best-of-breed platforms serving finance, HR, procurement, and supply chain teams, with each team owning its domain deeply while staying connected to the business through a corporate engagement layer powered by frontier models and open protocols.

This is not a hypothesis. The new enterprise stack already has clear domain owners emerging across sales, people management, finance, manufacturing, and demand planning. At the corporate level, frontier AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are able to connect each vertical through open protocols like MCP and A2A.

In a May 2026 analysis from McKinsey, “the radical view” calls for AI agents replicating ERP capabilities, eliminating the need for ERP systems altogether. But the more realistic and achievable scenario is that an “agentic operating model will be a new layer on top of the system foundation to enable workflow execution and decision-making across domains and systems,” with a stable backbone that still provides the data integrity, auditability, compliance, and control every enterprise still needs.

Now companies face two fundamental questions: which best-in-class platform to use for each domain, and how best to connect data and intelligence across those domains at the corporate engagement layer.

Our answer to the first question starts with spend management, which we believe is the most consequential domain in the enterprise, governing how every dollar is committed, every supplier relationship is managed, and every buy-side commercial decision is executed. Getting this domain right can positively impact both growth and profitability when that intelligence is connected and extended across the enterprise.

Extending Coupa’s value across the new agentic enterprise with Tonkean

Our recent acquisition of Tonkean does more than just improve procurement and spend workflows. With Tonkean now powering Coupa Compose Intake & Orchestration (I&O), the acquisition really does two things at once. First, it positions Coupa as the spend vertical in the new agentic-as-a-service enterprise (see diagram below), with Coupa’s spend intelligence participating natively in the corporate engagement layer that connects every domain in the stack.  

Equally important, it extends Coupa’s reach to provide value to other business functions beyond procurement, such as legal, IT, and HR, with Tonkean’s award-winning orchestration solutions. And Coupa will continue to invest in Tonkean’s non-procurement solutions and orchestration capabilities to connect the critical domains so they extend enterprise-wide.  

Importantly, customers can either adopt these solutions as part of Coupa Compose and our leading source-to-pay platform, or on a standalone basis if they are just looking for a specific orchestration need.

"New" Enterprise Landscape (Agentic-as-a-Service)

In the new agentic enterprise architecture, owning a particular “domain” is only half the equation. Company processes rarely live in one domain. That’s why every vertical platform must also participate in the corporate engagement layer. This involves passing data and intelligence, triggering workflows, receiving context from every other vertical it touches, and gatekeeping the process itself by guiding people and agents through it. Without that capability, even the best vertical platform remains just a silo. And Tonkean’s capabilities enable Coupa to be the orchestration bridge to this engagement layer.
With over 20 years of powering a network of more than 11 million buyers and suppliers, Coupa uses a trusted $10 trillion dataset foundation across all enterprise spend. With Coupa Compose and Tonkean, we now uniquely connect and extend our intelligent spend insights, decisions, and actions enterprise-wide to functions like legal, sales, finance, HR, and demand planning.

This is what Tonkean provides us: a way to make all of an organization’s components — its technology, people, systems, processes, policies, and AI agents across departments — work better together. Coupa now connects the agentic enterprise precisely because it is functionally agnostic, not constrained to any single department.

Tonkean empowered Coupa to accelerate our roadmap and deliver autonomous spend management at speed and scale, extending the reach and power of our Agentic Trade Network.

Most enterprises don’t have an AI problem. They have a handoff problem.

If you ask a CFO or CIO what’s keeping their AI investments from delivering at scale, you’ll get a version of the same answer. The models are powerful. The use cases are clear enough. The challenge is relieving people of the manual toil in getting the output of one system into the next system —  autonomously, reliably, safely, and aligned with the company process.

Let me give you a concrete example. A sourcing agent identifies a preferred supplier. Someone has to notify legal to generate the contract. Legal generates the contract. Someone has to route it to the right approver. The approver signs. Someone has to trigger the supplier onboarding workflow in the ERP. The ERP updates. Someone has to notify accounts payable to set up the payment terms.

At every step, there is a handoff to trigger the next step. And in most enterprises, a human fills it.

This is the hidden cost of agentic AI: not the agents, but the handoffs between them. You can deploy the most capable procurement agent in the world, but if it can’t pass its output to the next system autonomously and reliably, you’ve automated a task while leaving the process manual.

In his review of our acquisition strategy, industry analyst Shashi Bellamkonda said, “the hidden cost of agentic adoption is not compute. It is integration debt.” Without a unified orchestration layer, our customers become the integrator of their own agentic operating system. Every enterprise that has tried to stitch together point AI solutions over the past two years knows exactly what I mean. We believe it is our job to absolve that debt, with a solution that connects and orchestrates your agentic operating system.

And here is the critical insight the enterprise software industry has mostly missed: this handoff problem is not just a procurement problem. It’s an enterprise-wide architectural problem. The same gap that exists between a sourcing agent and a contract management system exists between every vertical pillar in the stack — between Coupa and HCM, finance and CRM, SCM and manufacturing, and so on, to and from other systems.  The handoffs between systems are where enterprise AI goes to die, regardless of how capable the AI within any individual system might be.

This enterprise-wide AI orchestration is the problem Tonkean was purpose-built to solve and is the critical missing layer in the era of the new agentic enterprise. And that’s why bringing Tonkean into the Coupa family fundamentally changes what enterprise AI can actually do for the agentic enterprise as a whole.  We’re excited to work with customers to bring this best-of-breed, agentic-as-a-service era to life to drive tremendous business outcomes, with Coupa as your trusted partner in the journey.