Zip: Pushing the possible in procurement orchestration

Agentic AI has the potential to transform the entire procurement ecosystem, and Zip has been among the early adopters.

At Zip’s inaugural AI Summit in New York earlier this year, the company announced agentic procurement orchestration and a fleet of over 50 purpose-built AI agents designed to automate specific, manual tasks across procurement, finance, legal, IT and security.

And since its founding in 2020, Zip has pushed the envelope in orchestration and the way in which businesses spend. It is something that isn’t lost on Roque Versace, Managing Director, EMEA, at Zip who believes that AI is simply technology that ‘accelerates processes and reduces risk’. 

“AI will continue to get smarter, continue to get more agentic and continue to improve so I find that really exciting,” he tells us. “At the core, it’s just how we use automation to speed up things, but beyond that, it’s about what we will continue to learn in the future. The agents that we’ve released will handle complex things such as tariff assessments, contract reviews and compliance checks. It’s going to eliminate a lot of time.”

Indeed, the scale of this transformation is well underway. Last year, Zip approved more than 14 million requests and it is expected based on Zip’s growth that the number will shoot up to 58 million approved requests by 2026, with 30% of those handled autonomously by agents. While over the next five years, that number could reach over a billion approvals yearly with 90% of them completed entirely by agentic AI. 

“When you look at the procurement process and you see with us launching 50 agents, it didn’t take long to find 50 different areas of very manual, time consuming and error prone tasks that need to be automated,” explains Versace. “If you’re a company that’s not automating your procurement process, then you are essentially killing the careers of your people because they’re going to be doing a lot of the manual stuff that AI will take over doing. It will be problematic if they haven’t had the chance to flex their more strategic muscle because they’ve been mired in 50, 60 or 70% of their time being tasked with doing these things that are very low value. I think AI is central because there are just so many very manual tasks that don’t require a lot of thought that can be solved easily.

“AI is everywhere, and the use cases for procurement are pretty straightforward. I think you’re going to find that a lot of the agents that are rolled out in procurement are so valuable. I believe one of the reasons for that is that with orchestration, you’re laying down a workflow that can be followed very cleanly where you can intersperse AI into that overall workflow really well. By doing that, you are using the workflow of the orchestration that we have as a frame from which to put AI in. The idea down the road is that the orchestration and the workflow is replaced by agentic processes, but we’re not there yet. The combination of a Zip orchestration platform powered by AI is going to help us get there quickly, safely, and effectively.”

Zip’s 2030 roadmap is clear, the future is clearly agentic.

Find out more about Zip here.