On The AI Floor, Shamil Malachiyev sits down with Sören Petsch, Senior Director of Procurement at Root Insurance, for a ground-level look at what AI agents actually do inside a finance org today - the ones already in production, the receipts, and the 80-90% of procurement work that is pure administrative tedium.
Sören has spent 15 years in procurement across software, retail banking and insurance. He's implemented workflow automation platforms multiple times over, built custom AI agents, and ran his own consulting practice focused on procurement automation with LLMs and multi-agent systems. His current system has cleared 42,000+ approvals and a mid-nine-figure spend across 145 users since a single June go-live. He also grew up in East Germany - "a country that doesn't exist anymore" - which is exactly why he refuses to treat today's status quo as permanent.
Expect to learn:
- Why "it's not about jobs, it's about tasks" is the reframe that finally unlocks automation
- What Sören's own informal read of ~500 procurement job posts found - under 4% - and what the other 96% are still hiring for
- What an "AI agent" actually is, explained through a real one: cross-checking a vendor's legal name across their certificate of insurance and their W9 registration papers, ~100 times a week
- Why you start with orchestration and data flow, not "just implement AI" - and how "the system becomes the policy"
- Where AI is genuinely good right now: legal-document review, InfoSec/SOC 2 checks, multi-PDF reconciliation - where Sören expects to cut reviews from 8-10 days to 3-4
- Human in the loop, human on the loop, full autonomy - and why a human still has to carry the accountability
- The flagship build: fully autonomous certificate-of-insurance collection, from roughly 0% collected to 100%
- Why he calls the confidential-data panic an overblown concern - ZDR agreements, local models, and what actually needs protecting
CHAPTERS
1:35 Episode open & guest intro
2:28 A country that doesn't exist anymore - and the tsunami you can't stop
5:15 Under 4%: what ~500 procurement job posts really asked for
7:31 Start with orchestration, not "just implement AI" - "the system becomes the policy"
10:49 Where AI is genuinely good today: legal review, SOC 2, multi-PDF checks
13:05 What an "AI agent" actually is - the W9/COI cross-check agent
16:12 The InfoSec agent: aiming to take 8-10 days down to 3-4
16:43 Confidential data, ZDR & local LLMs: an overblown concern?
19:08 Craftsmen vs. Henry Ford: the white-collar production line
20:35 "It's not about jobs. It's about tasks."
22:56 Stacks of paper: digitizing the data flow
28:20 The tool landscape: P2P vs. intake-to-procure
34:20 Change management: what happens to Billy?
40:46 The receipts: 42,000+ approvals, 145 users, one June go-live
46:03 Accountability: human in the loop, on the loop, full autonomy
48:21 The flagship build: fully autonomous COI collection
51:03 The future: smaller teams, more roles & the fractional CPO
55:18 Sören's AI toolkit: ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini & Claude Code
59:16 What to do on Monday: "start doing something" + NotebookLM as a team training tool
1:01:59 "Nobody's behind. We're all at the start of the race."
👇 CONNECT WITH SÖREN PETSCH
Sören Petsch ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/sorenpetsch
Root Insurance ► https://www.joinroot.com/
👇 CONNECT WITH SHAMIL
Shamil Malachiyev ►https://www.linkedin.com/in/shamilmalachiyev/
FluidLabs ► https://fluidlabs.com/
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ABOUT THIS CHANNEL
The AI Floor (The Founder's Code, Season 2) - honest, ground-level conversations with the people actually building AI inside the world's biggest companies. No hype, just what's real.
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