?_How Do Buyer24's AI Agents Work?

Buyer24 runs a multi-agent system: a coordinating Cockpit that talks to the user, and three specialist agents that each own a specific domain of procurement work. When you describe a need in the Cockpit, it routes the request — or the relevant sub-steps — to whichever specialist is responsible. Each agent runs end-to-end work in the background, escalating to a human only at approval gates or when it hits an exception.

This separation is intentional. Generic procurement chatbots try to do everything in one prompt; Buyer24's agents are scoped, so each one is good at its part and easy to audit.

The Three Specialist Agents

Supplier Agent

Owns your supplier catalog. Three main jobs:

• Find new suppliers. Researches the web for candidates that fit a brief (industry, region, capabilities, certifications). Vets each candidate against your existing pool to dedupe.
• Discover contacts. Pulls a reachable email from each supplier's site. Suppliers without a public-facing contact are dropped — there's no point sending an RFQ that won't be opened.
• Audit and enrich. Periodically re-checks supplier records (industries, capabilities, regions, tags, certifications) and flags stale entries.

The Supplier Agent feeds clean, RFQ-ready supplier records into the Procurement Agent.

Procurement Agent

Owns the RFQ lifecycle. It:

• Drafts requests using your saved templates and the brief from the Cockpit.
• Sends to discovered contacts in parallel; tracks delivery, opens, and replies.
• Watches the unified inbox for supplier responses. Triages each reply (quote, clarifying question, decline, follow-up needed) and validates incoming quotes against your original requirements (completeness, pricing math, format, deadline).
• Drafts answers to suppliers' clarifying questions from the original brief, so common back-and-forth doesn't bottleneck on a human.
• Builds a normalized side-by-side comparison once enough quotes are in, with a recommendation and reasoning.

This is the agent that "does the procurement" — the others support it.

Engineering Agent

Owns your B2B website (an optional Buyer24 capability for buyers who want a public-facing supplier-facing portal). It generates and synchronizes pages, manages layout and content, and keeps the site current as your supplier catalog and product offering change. If you don't run a B2B website on Buyer24, this agent stays idle.

How They Coordinate

The Cockpit is the only thing the user talks to. Behind the scenes:

1. The Cockpit classifies your request into a domain (sourcing, RFQ work, comparison, supplier audit, website work).
2. It dispatches a task to the corresponding specialist agent.
3. The specialist runs the task — sometimes calling other tools (web search, email send, document parser) and sometimes calling another agent for help.
4. Results come back to the Cockpit, which formats them for you (a comparison table, a draft RFQ, an updated supplier list).
5. Anything that needs human approval (sending email, finalizing a quote) waits in the chat with a clear "ok to go?" prompt.

You can run multiple agent tasks in parallel — sourcing one need while the Procurement Agent processes replies on another, while a third comparison runs in the background.

How Buyer24 Helps

Try the agent flow live: see the interactive demo on the homepage or start a free POC.

FAQ

What's the difference between the Cockpit and the agents?

The Cockpit is the chat-driven control surface a human talks to. The agents are the specialists doing the actual work — sourcing suppliers, drafting RFQs, parsing quotes. The Cockpit decides which agent handles a request and reports back to you. See what is the Buyer24 Cockpit for more.

Can I see what an agent is doing while it runs?

Yes. Every task shows live status in the queue (running, awaiting approval, complete, failed) and a run history of every step the agent took, including the tools it called. You can pause, retry, or cancel anything that's in flight.

Can the agents send email or make changes without my approval?

Only at the automation level you set. Default is "ask before send" — the agent prepares everything, then waits for your approval at each outbound step. You can also set full autopilot (the agent acts and reports) or fully manual (you approve every step). Approval gates are configurable per-action.

What if an agent picks the wrong supplier or drafts a bad RFQ?

Review and edit before approval. Every draft is shown in the Cockpit before it goes out. If a supplier the Supplier Agent surfaced is wrong, mark it as such — the agent learns to deprioritize that source for future searches in your organization.