Starlink is testing IBM agents in Middle East procurement as the regional distributor bets on automating supply margins

Starlink, the regional distributor of technology solutions in the Middle East and Africa and a subsidiary of the Infinight group, has begun operating a system based on AI agents in collaboration with IBM, in an effort to automate procurement processes and review supplier documents. The project, which the company describes as a “Client Zero” program to test the technologies internally on its own operations before market launch, aims to reduce the time wasted in reviewing price quotes and purchase orders, paving the way to roll the operating model out to more than 1,500 partners and customers in the region.

The system relies on two of IBM’s autonomous agent tools: IBM Bob, which serves as a partner for planning, building, testing and deploying agents, and the Watson X Orchestrate platform, which manages these agents and operates them in the field. The platform reads incoming email messages, validates the extracted data against records, and coordinates tasks across the distributor’s existing systems, including Oracle NetSuite, the document-extraction tool Docling, and Automation Anywhere solutions for automation.

Joint estimates from the two companies indicate that the system targets saving roughly 11,500 work hours per year in the procurement department.This saving is distributed across 6,000 hours of automating about 9,000 purchase orders, 1,500 hours of processing roughly 14,000 price quotes, and an additional 4,000 hours that were previously spent matching offers with internal records and vendor documents.According to the disclosed data, the time to examine a document and compare it fell from thirty minutes to about three minutes, a reduction of 90 percent, alongside a cut in the time to build and test agents from two weeks to two days.

From the perspective of trade and technology distribution in Gulf markets and the region, this bet is inseparable from the sector’s structure itself. Regional distributors operate with relatively low profit margins in device resale and software licensing, and the hours wasted in back-office functions translate into direct financial drain. Linking agents to solutions such as NetSuite and Automation Anywhere, tools that are widely deployed by major Gulf firms, offers automation as an incremental upgrade to existing investments, without requiring a complete overhaul of infrastructure.

What changes in practice for procurement and technology teams in the Gulf and Egypt is that this approach demonstrates the viability of starting with heavy administrative tasks constrained by rules and paper transactions, rather than venturing into open interfaces with customers.This shift compels supply-chain managers and system officers to focus on skills for calibrating extraction criteria and linking verification rules to accounting tools.so that employees’ tasks are limited to reviewing exceptions and resolving data conflicts.

The experiment’s success remains contingent on testing it outside the distributor’s pilot environment; the announced figures are based on data from the two parties without review by an independent auditor. The true impact will become clear when the system is extended to the broader partner network that works with heterogeneous, non-standard document formats, a challenge that will determine whether AI agents can bridge the gap between theoretical proposals and daily commercial operations.