Inside the Zip AI Summit

On the 10th of June, preceding DPW New York 2025, Zip hosted its own invite-only AI summit in Brooklyn, NYC. Taking place at the Ace Hotel, Zip gathered over 100 procurement professionals to discuss agentic orchestration and run workshops and roundtables, enabling guests to learn, share, and network. 

That very morning, Zip announced major news: the release of a suite of 50+ AI agents to automate high-impact tasks, from tariff analysis to GDPR compliance, and everything in between. This announcement created an even bigger buzz at the AI summit, which kicked off with an introduction from Lu Cheng, Co-Founder and CTO of Zip.

Cheng stated that the Zip team has been looking forward to the summit all year, and – vitally – to this monumental product launch. He discussed the fact that the entire point of Zip, since its creation in 2020, has been to make technology and processes less painful, and since then the business has changed the industry. Now, Zip is trusted by hundreds of enterprise customers, delivering an average of 3.6% in savings, and 55% faster purchasing cycles.

“Today marks the most important milestone in Zip history, and the biggest leap forward procurement has ever seen,” said Cheng from the stage. These 50+ agents will be embedded into workflowers to complete specific tasks. Customers can choose from any of the templates, or build their own custom agent. These agents save millions of hours, and completely redefine what procurement can be.

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Lu Cheng, Co-Founder and CTO of Zip

Tell us about the launch of these AI agents.

“It’s something that we’ve been working on for the past year, and a lot of it has been grounded from where we were at the very beginning, five years ago. We started by creating the intake and procurement orchestration category, which is truly revolutionary as a standalone salon product. But it’s been really exciting in the last five years. With intake and procurement orchestration, we’ve been able to not only help orchestrate the workflow, but deliver real ROI along the way. We’ve been able to deliver 3.6% in savings, double the number of compliant purchases, and significantly improve cycle times along the way by 55%. 

“We truly believe the next evolution is agentic procurement orchestration, and it’s embedding AI agents into every single part of the workflow. We’re really excited for this launch, and part of that is taking the actual intake request information itself and determining, hey, is it categorised properly? Are the payment terms within company compliance and policy? We’re really excited about these agents, because it’ll truly change how we think about running and operating the function.”

This technology represents a huge shift away from AI assisted workplace, to becoming fully autonomous. From your perspective, what does that shift look like?

“It’s really a multi-phase journey that every company will need to work on. With AI, the evolution is so fast. Every week, every month, every couple of months, there have been fundamental step function changes in the foundation models, and the internal adoption of AI. And for us, this is where we focus on agents and what they can do for our customers. Over the next two to three years, we see a world where agents will be able to autonomously run a lot of review processes themselves. We’re at the very first stages of our journey today, and are starting to partner with our customers to embed agents into specific aspects of their workflow with our 50 agents. Over time, we really see a large transformation across the entire function.”

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A fundamental shift in procurement

Nikki Garcia, Lead Product Marketing Manager at Zip, also took to the stage during the introduction to the summit. She discussed the fact that procurement has fundamentally changed, and that it’s at the centre of a complex network. Making sense of it is difficult, and mistakes can be costly. As a result, the stakes are higher than ever. Procurement teams are buried in work that could, and should, be automated, weighed down and overwhelmed by repetitive tasks. 

The answer is AI. Many core procurement tasks are a perfect match for AI to tackle, and AI agents are the best possible use of this technology. Garcia stated that these agents should be thought of as interns that need very specific direction and rules. What makes Zip’s agents different is their specificity. 

Phil Pappone, Director of Solutions Engineering at Zip, went on to talk about the fact that agents can be baked into the workflow at any point, reviewing documents to pull key insights, and being used to research current relevant events – like tariffs – to help humans make business decisions. They can even investigate whether a supplier is subject to DORA, and can streamline compliance associated with that. Zip is the connective tissue of this orchestration process, while its agents can be dropped into the workflow and deployed seamlessly.

Cheng closed out the introduction to the day with a reminder that Zip is leading the next evolution of agentic procurement orchestration. “This is the agent-first future we all need to plan for,” he stated, “and this is only the beginning”. Cheng also predicted that by 2028, agents will be working independently. 

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Laurie Hill, VP, Procurement Innovations, Systems & Analytics at Prudential

What are your thoughts on the Zip AI Summit so far?

“It’s been really great. There are a lot of networking opportunities, and we’ve heard a lot of very interesting things from the presenters and the panels.”

Zip announced its 50+ specialised AI agents today. What do you think about this move?

I’m super excited about this. We had been looking for help in our organisation a lot when we implemented Zip in January, and I think this will be a tremendous addition. We’re already starting to have conversations within my team about how this might overlap with some of the things that we’re doing. I love the fact that it is very specific to steps in the process, and not super broad.”

From your perspective, what are some of the biggest challenges that procurement is facing right now?

“I think we have a huge amount of volume that we haven’t necessarily had before. Our businesses are looking to move a lot faster than they had been in the past, and they’re expecting us to be able to do that, so we have to meet that challenge.”

Tell me your thoughts on working with Zip. 

“We’ve had a great relationship with them. The team that we’ve been working with has been fantastic. Our implementations so far have gone really well. We continue to try to leverage the team as much as we can, we’re looking forward to continuing to grow with them.”

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AI at the core of everything

Felix Meng, Co-Founder and VP of Zip, later led a panel of procurement leaders in a session entitled ‘Preparing for procurement’s agent-first future’. In the wake of Zip’s agent announcement, it was a timely deep-dive into what it means to make AI the core of procurement operations. Each panelist talked about what they’re excited about regarding AI within their companies, and what they’re sceptical about, e.g. being distrustful of AI, or a fear of being replaced. 

The discussion then revolved around what having agents living within the orchestration layer can do, and how they drive AI. The key is getting people on board who can see the potential, but driving adoption of the vision is a challenge. The panel also touched on an important point: that not everything should involve AI, because some tasks require the human touch. However, the use of agents represents thousands of saved hours, and enables businesses to use that recovered time for things like strategy development, continuous improvement, and upskilling.

AI’s current wave

Then Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO of Zip, took to the stage with Jay Simons, General Partner at Bond. This AI luminary session shone a spotlight on Simons as an AI visionary, as he discussed his view on AI with Zaparde. Simons began in enterprise software, and wanted to give back to and invest in a smaller business that shared the same vision as him. 

When asked whether this current wave of AI is meaningfully different, Simons said yes. “AI is advantaged because of all that’s come before it, but it’s also profoundly different,” he explained. “We’re finally able to create thinking machines, and introduce capabilities that can think on our behalf. AI is an amplifier for fast-moving category leaders.”

Simons also acknowledged that some are still stubbornly resistant to change, but that’s shifting and being unlearned. It will only get better.

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William Yan, Senior Product Manager, Zip

What does the shift towards agentic AI look like?

“We want to do a crawl, walk, run. Not only from a technological standpoint – and obviously things are still developing and getting better – but even from a change management standpoint, people aren’t comfortable leaping straight into it. It’s about getting people used to using AI. Initially, it’s really about augmenting. It’s about supporting the person that makes the decision. So now, as we start shifting to more agentic, more autonomy, we have this internal framework around levels of autonomy. We definitely feel like we’re in the early stages of that, both from a confidence in our own technology and comfort level of our customers for adopting. Over time, as our customers build confidence, and as we build confidence, we can see that shift in terms of taking more complexity, more autonomy with these agents.”

When you were planning this summit today, what were some of the elements that you were determined to make sure that you could bring for your customers?

“We obviously wanted to share our vision and the products that we are launching with. We wanted the voice of the customer to come and see, because it feels like a lot of the time, we hear that everyone’s thinking about AI, but people aren’t necessarily talking to each other. And so a forum to hear from peers is really helpful. We also had the workshop, which for us, was really about demystifying the agents. I think people can be intimidated.”

Let’s talk about the workshop. How did it go? Do you think that people left with a better idea of what agents are and what they mean?

“I hope so. We had some good discussions afterwards, as people were thinking about the different problems. I feel like it helped people understand and part of the challenge is when you think about where to apply AI without boundaries, you think, ‘I have so many problems, where do I start?’ And it’s hard to build that intuition. I think the framing that we built helped guide that discussion. We’re encouraging people to think a little bit more simply about high value, but repetitive tasks; things that can be clearly defined.”

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Inspiring conversation

Following William Yan’s ‘design your own agent’ workshop, Anthropic’s Katie Streu, Head of Procurement, and Adam Dix, Head of Finance Operations, then led a session about the business’s AI maturity framework. The talk centred around Claude, a family of LLMs, and its position as a consultant, teammate, agent, and analyst. The pair discussed their vision for AI in procurement, including adoption, automation, and assurance. 

They stated that, in the future, everything to do with these elements will be dealt with by AI agents – and we’re close to realising that future. It’s about building trust through verification, which involves a human being in the loop. AI isn’t going to replace everyone, but everyone needs to be on board with how AI can assist them.

Before the summit wound down, attendees broke into groups for discussion roundtables. The groups talked about procurement’s AI maturity curve, setting AI expectations, assessing AI maturity, and looking ahead at the next few years and what they might hold. The buzz didn’t abate, the chatter continuing long after the event finished and guests began leaving for the DPW New York opening party.

The Zip AI Summit proved the perfect precursor to DPW New York 2025, setting the scene and getting people excited to talk more about agentic AI. Congratulations to Zip for a successful event, which the CPOstrategy team was thrilled and honoured to attend.