It’s Monday morning. Leadership has just approved twelve new sites across Poland, Ireland, and Mexico, and the go-live date is already in the board deck. You are in the sourcing chair, and your job is to get them connected: the right bandwidth, the right SLA, and the right price, from providers you can actually rely on.

It’s not your first rodeo, and you know well what to do. You build the site list. You write the RFP. You send it to a shortlist of carriers and aggregators, answer their clarification questions, and wait. Then the responses arrive. One vendor quotes in euros, another in dollars and pesos. One prices a 36-month term, another prices 24. Someone has quietly swapped DIA for business broadband at three sites. And one response is a 40-page PDF with the actual pricing on page 31.

Before comparing anything, you first need to spend days normalizing it all into one spreadsheet. And that’s just the beginning. On average, a global connectivity RFP will take between 6 and 10 months.

The work is growing. The team isn’t.

AI is changing what enterprise networks need. Agents create far more sessions, far more upload traffic, and much tighter latency budgets than human users tolerate. Many network teams will need to upgrade their sites within the next one to two years.

And yes. This also lands on a procurement desk.

More sites to re-source means more RFPs, more vendors per region, and more responses to compare. And headcount rarely grows to match. Something has to give, and it shouldn’t be the quality of the decision.

The tools you have today (and where they stop) 

Procurement and sourcing teams aren’t short on tools. The problem is that most of them help you manage the process, not the research behind it.

• E-sourcing and RFx platforms keep questionnaires, deadlines, and vendor communication in one place.
• Spreadsheets are still where most normalizing and scoring actually happens.
• General AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot can draft an RFP, summarize long responses, and suggest providers to invite.

That last one is where it gets interesting, and also risky.

Ask an AI assistant who to invite to an RFP in Warsaw, Dublin, or Amsterdam, and you’ll get a confident answer: a few provider names, perhaps an aggregator or two, all very sure of themselves. The confidence is the issue, we experimented with it ourselves and wrote about it in this blog.

Not everything is Googleable

Internet may be a global product, but buying it well is a local job. And it requires local insight.

Think about it. Every provider’s website will promise the best SLA, the best bandwidth, and the best service. Depending on the country, there might be no difference between three local vendors, or there might be a huge difference.  

Large language models can’t tell those cases apart, because that data isn’t public. LLMs crawl the web. They don’t measure ISP performance, don’t see real on-net coverage, or know which provider in a given city consistently delivers on time. That knowledge only comes from sourcing and delivering services in that market, over and over.

So general AI is a good writing assistant for an RFP. It isn’t a sourcing engine.

What agentic sourcing actually means

Agentic sourcing goes a step further than a chatbot. Instead of answering one question at a time, an AI agent takes a goal, breaks it into steps, and works through them with real tools and real data: running searches, requesting prices, comparing options, and coming back with a recommendation and its reasoning.

Then a human checks it. Every time.

There’s a lot of hype about agents buying entire networks without anyone involved. We’re not there yet, and for good reason. Enterprise sales, contract negotiation, and final approval are still human jobs. Agents do the heavy lifting. You stay the one who says yes or no.

Data-driven sourcing with GNX+

Up to now, we hope we’ve made it clear that data matters, expertise matters, local know-how matters. And that’s exactly what we’ve built in GNX+.

Our carrier-neutral connectivity platform sits on GNX’s direct relationships with 3,000+ ISPs in more than 190 countries, built up through years of sourcing, delivering, and supporting local connectivity worldwide. 

So what does GNX+ give procurement teams that LLMs can’t?

• Instant quotes for internet access across competing local providers, per site.
• Firm pricing pulled directly from provider integrations where available.
• Like-for-like comparison of options, with no PDF archaeology required.
• Diversity options that show you where a true second path exists and where it doesn’t.
• Click-to-order, so the quote becomes an order in the same flow.
• API and eBonding to connect GNX+ to the procurement tools you already use.

Plus, GNX+ comes with a team of experts behind it, so when a site needs a closer look, there’s a person to call, not just a portal.