How a Two-Person Team Runs Global Procurement at Tripadvisor

Freya Hurwitz, Director of Global Procurement at Tripadvisor, joined Sudozi CEO Rose Punkunus for a live conversation on how a two-person team manages vendors, contracts, and approvals across all of Tripadvisor’s brands—and what changed after deploying Sudozi.

The Starting Point: No System, No Visibility

When Freya moved into procurement seven years ago, there was no system of record, no contract repository, and no intake process. She built everything from scratch—a JIRA project for ticketing, a Google Drive folder for contracts, a spreadsheet for tracking renewals—all manually maintained.

“Everyone had their own contracts on their own desktops. There was no ticketing feature, so we didn’t know what contracts we needed to work on.”

The result: Freya became the unintentional gatekeeper of all vendor information for a company with thousands of employees. Approvals from finance, security, and legal all ran through manual emails. Every other procurement tool she evaluated required too much administrative overhead for a two-person team.

Pilot to Global in Three Months

The team piloted Sudozi with two or three departments, collected feedback from legal, finance, and security stakeholders, then rolled out company-wide. The full launch happened roughly three months after the pilot began.

“No one needed any sort of instructions. We put together all these documents for everybody on how to create tickets. And I don’t think anyone ever looked at any of them because it’s just so intuitive.”

Ongoing configuration stays lightweight—Freya added an InfoSec team to an approval step the morning of the webinar. It took five minutes.

Features Driving the Most Value

AI Prompts

AI prompts run in real time as requests come in. Tripadvisor uses them for vendor comparison and duplicate detection—automatically flagging when an existing approved tool already covers a new request.

“We use this as a duplicate check so we can see if someone’s requesting a new tool and we already have something similar in our catalog.”

Unlike a separate ChatGPT tab, these agents have full context: contract history, department ownership, and historical spend from ERP data.

Workflows, Forms & Ad-Hoc Steps

Approval workflows are fully self-configurable. Tripadvisor uses conditional nested forms for AI compliance questionnaires and business cases over $500K. When unexpected needs arise, Freya inserts ad-hoc steps into any active workflow without reconfiguring the process.

Renewals & Contract Intelligence

Renewal reminders are configured per contract based on actual lead time needed. AI extracts service details and renewal clauses from order forms, structuring pricing and terms automatically. Notifications route via Slack to business owners.

Managing the AI Wild West

With AI tool requests surging, Tripadvisor built dedicated request types in Sudozi that route free AI tools directly to legal and compliance—bypassing procurement entirely. Their IT team blocks unapproved AI tools on corporate devices and uses Sudozi as the source of truth.

“Procurement doesn’t care—it’s free. But that doesn’t mean there’s no risk to the company. There’s potentially more risk because we’re probably operating under their standard terms.”

Next up: team-specific AI summaries so legal, finance, and security reviewers can approve faster without digging through multiple sources.

Key Takeaways

• Team size doesn’t limit scope. Two people run global procurement at Tripadvisor. The right tooling makes it possible.
• Pilot first, then go global. Start with two or three teams, collect real feedback, and launch company-wide within months.
• Low admin overhead is non-negotiable. If your team can’t spare bandwidth for tool maintenance, the tool is wrong.
• Free tools aren’t risk-free. AI governance requires compliance workflows even when procurement isn’t involved.

Want to see how Sudozi can help your procurement team do more with less? Book a demo to explore the features discussed in this webinar.