3 takeaways from the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Procurement and Sourcing, 2025

The Gartner® ‘Hype Cycle for Procurement and Sourcing Solutions, 2025’ has arrived, providing a snapshot of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems, and exploiting new opportunities.

It’s a useful framework that tracks how ideas evolve, from ‘Innovation Trigger’ through the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’, eventual ‘Trough of Disillusionment’, and finally, the ‘Plateau of Productivity’.

Last year, ‘procurement orchestration’ was listed on the Hype Cycle for the first time as “embryonic” for its maturity and ‘transformational’ for its benefit rating, and Zip was named as a Sample Vendor. 

This year’s Hype Cycle, in our opinion, has confirmed that the market is catching up to what we’ve believed from the beginning.

In 2025, orchestration has evolved from a distinct category to part of a broader, accelerated trend that includes AI agents, and with it, a fundamental reimagining of what the work of procurement should be.

Here are my takeaways from this year’s Hype Cycle, and what it means for the road ahead.

1. Orchestration and AI aren’t separate trends, but part of one movement

The first big theme is this: orchestration and AI aren’t on two parallel tracks, but are deeply connected parts of the same broader transformation. This is a mega trend.

AI gives you intelligence. Orchestration gives you tools and actions. Together, they create a new kind of capability that will lead to  a smarter, more adaptive procurement function. 

Notably, procurement orchestration, AI agents, and autonomous procurement are all listed as trends with potentially “transformative benefit.” This group, in our view, highlights how these technologies aim to tackle different magnitudes of problems than traditional source-to-pay applications.

2. Source-to-pay is no longer enough

Here’s the second takeaway: source-to-pay is being stretched to its breaking point. In our opinion, Gartner is expanding the definition of the category because traditional suites don’t cover what procurement teams actually need today.

As mentioned in the document, both intake management and category management have been added to the definition of a source-to-pay suite. . These are all vital areas that historically did not fit neatly into legacy S2P boxes. But once you step outside the box, including to applications that sit outside of procurement’s tech stack, you need a way to tie everything together. That’s one of many innovation triggers behind orchestration.

An orchestration platform, as we’re observing, is essential infrastructure today. It’s what allows you to unify tools, manage processes, and govern spend without forcing everyone into a monolithic suite.

3. AI is moving fast, and AI agents are the next evolution

AI adoption is happening faster than ever. Intake took four years to climb to the peak of inflated expectations. Generative AI raced past this peak in one or two. Now we’re seeing AI agents begin their rise, and we believe that the Gartner research aligns closely with ours.

They say, ”Early agents will act as assistants and conduct simple tasks before maturing into more advanced, complex operators.” That’s exactly how we’ve approached Zip’s agent roadmap: starting with targeted, task-level agents that solve real procurement pain points today. Then expanding from there.

Zip’s focus is on building real, useful, usable agents that drive value right now, and laying the groundwork for increasing autonomy in the years ahead.

Why this matters

Zooming out, here’s the through line:

• Orchestration and AI are converging into one mega trend.
• Source-to-pay, as a framework, is being redefined, and orchestration is the connective tissue that makes the new model work.
• AI agents are accelerating through procurement applications, and Zip's orchestration-based approach is the right way to build for compatibility and integration into existing enterprise workflows.
  

We think that this year’s Gartner® ‘Hype Cycle for Procurement and Sourcing Solutions, 2025’ validates the direction Zip has been steering the industry toward. It tells us that the future of procurement will indeed be orchestrated, intelligent, and agentic.

If you’re interested in learning more about Zip’s agentic procurement orchestration platform, feel free to book some time, I’d be happy to chat.

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