Operations
Procurement comparisons built from quotes, not from vendor websites
A worker researches the field, collects what the vendors actually told you, and lists the questions you have not asked yet. You choose.
What the worker does
An AI worker in Polaris supports procurement by researching the available options with web search, collecting the quotes and answers vendors sent to your Gmail, and building a comparison table where every cell cites its source. It separates published pricing from what you were actually quoted, and lists the questions no vendor has answered. The buying decision and the negotiation stay with a person.
- Connections
- web search · Gmail · Google Drive
- Every cell
- Cites its source
- Separated
- Published price vs quoted price
The comparison spreadsheet is where procurement quietly goes wrong
Someone builds a grid of five vendors across nine criteria. Three of the cells come from a marketing page, two come from a sales call, one is a guess, and none of them says which is which. The grid then gets shown to a decision-maker who treats every cell as equally solid.
The fix is not a better grid. It is provenance: every cell carrying where it came from, so a reader can see instantly that the security answer came from a vendor's own website and the price came from a written quote.
That is dull work to do by hand and easy for a worker, which reads, cites and stops short of forming a preference.
How the comparison is built
| Row source | How it is marked | How much it should count |
|---|---|---|
| A written quote in your mailbox | Quoted, with the sender and date | The only pricing evidence worth planning on |
| Public pricing page | URL and date observed | A starting point that often does not survive a call |
| A claim on a vendor's marketing site | Quoted, marked as vendor-stated | Useful for what they choose to emphasize, not as fact |
| An answer from a sales call | Only if someone wrote it down and it is in the thread | As good as the note taken |
| No answer from anyone | Listed as an open question, not left blank | This is the row that decides the deal later |
The questions a worker will surface that nobody asked
Ask it to produce this list explicitly. It is usually more valuable than the comparison itself.
What happens at renewal
Published pricing rarely mentions the increase mechanism, and it is a question that costs money if you skip it.
What the exit looks like
Data export format, notice period and what happens to your records afterwards.
Which stated capability is actually available on the plan you are quoted
The gap between the feature page and the tier in the quote is a recurring source of unpleasant surprises.
Who else in the company already pays this vendor
The worker can check the vendor register and the charges before you buy a second contract with the same supplier.
Questions people ask
+Can the worker contact vendors for quotes?
It drafts the enquiry and a person sends it. Nothing is sent to a third party by a worker, which also means no vendor gets a machine-written enquiry with your company name on it that nobody read first.
+How current is the pricing research?
It reads public pages at the time it runs and records the date it observed them. Published pricing changes without notice, which is why the comparison marks a written quote as a different class of evidence from a web page.
+What happens after we choose?
The signed agreement goes into the vendor register, where the finance view tracks the spend and the renewal and the legal view tracks the terms. Running procurement in the same workspace means the decision, the quotes and the resulting contract stay linked.
+Is this worth it for a small purchase?
Probably not for a small one-off. It earns its place on recurring commitments and anything with an auto-renewal, where the cost of an unasked question compounds annually.
Related
Operations work with an AI worker doing the chasing
Ops is the function that holds the seams together. Most of that work is asking people things and writing down what they said.
Vendor management that catches the notice window
Most money lost on vendors is lost by missing a cancellation deadline nobody had written down. A worker keeps the register and dates the deadlines.
A register of what you actually signed
Finance tracks what a vendor costs. Legal needs to know what you promised them, what they promised you, and which of those promises has a date on it.
Stock alerts that arrive before you are out
Polaris does not hold your inventory. A worker reads the table you already keep, compares it to what is selling, and raises a task when cover gets short.
Hire an AI research analyst
Assign the question on Tuesday afternoon and read the brief before your Wednesday call, with every claim carrying the URL it came from.
Web search in Polaris
Nothing to authorize, nothing to store, and every query a worker runs appears in the activity feed while it works.
The cost of AI subscriptions for a team
Five figures a year at fifty people, and no shared record of what any of it produced.
Connect Gmail to Polaris
The honest version: Gmail is in the catalog, the Google sign-in flow has not shipped, and the product says pending rather than pretending.