Introducing agentic procurement orchestration from Zip

Today marks the biggest leap forward in Zip’s history.

At our inaugural Zip AI Summit today, we introduced a brand-new category: Agentic Procurement Orchestration. Alongside it, we have launched a suite of 50+ purpose-built AI agents designed to automate specific, manual tasks across procurement, finance, legal, IT, and security.

We believe this marks the beginning of a potential 100X improvement to the process of managing business spend, creating a world where procurement flows autonomously, allowing your teams to focus more deeply on the strategy that moves business forward.

Zip orchestrated the work. Now we’re automating it.

Since our founding nearly 5 years ago, Zip has led the way in orchestrating the way businesses spend. We started by reimagining the procurement process from intake to pay, and soon were the first procurement platform to launch generative AI features in 2023. 

But the truth is that orchestration was always step one.

We orchestrate the work so we can understand the work end-to-end. And now, with agentic AI, we can start automating it: intelligently, securely, and scalably.

The scale of this shift is already underway. Last year, in 2024, Zip approved over 14 million requests. Based on Zip’s growth, we expect to approve 58 million requests by 2026, with 30% handled autonomously by agents. By 2030, that number will grow to over 1 billion approvals a year, with 90% of them completed entirely by AI. 

That’s 900 million tasks reviewed, validated, and executed by intelligent agents purpose-built for the job.

Zip’s AI agents: purpose-built for procurement, designed for autonomy

AI agents are AI systems that use reasoning to automate tasks. They can perform actions, reason through problems, and make decisions, effectively acting on your behalf. 

However, most AI agents today are too generalized. They can claim to be all-purpose assistance, but often fall short when applied to real business workflows, especially when it comes to an extremely cross-functional, distributed, and granularly-focused function like procurement. 

This is why Zip has taken a foundationally different approach.

We’ve built 50+ AI agents designed to automate specific, manual tasks like validating data, surfacing risk against company policy, scanning contracts, and ensuring compliance within procurement, legal, IT and security. These agents can act and make contextually informed decisions, and are embedded into approval workflows where the work actually happens.

This granular specialization gives Zip’s model two key advantages:

1. Short-term impact: Focused agents do their job with precision. They deliver tangible value immediately by saving time, reducing errors, and accelerating approvals.
2. Longer-term autonomy: By automating specific tasks first, Zip agents lay the groundwork for chaining together more complex sequences of work. You can’t trust an agent to run your procurement process until you trust it to complete one task autonomously. Zip is transparently building that trust, task by task.

‍This is how real agentic autonomy happens: not by promising magic, but my mastering repeatable tasks and building towards more complex outcomes.

Why are Zip agents different?

• Purpose-built for procurement: designed from the ground up for business spend. 
• Embedded directly into workflows: Deployed at approval nodes, so they operate seamlessly within your existing approval nodes and workflows. 
• Well orchestrated: Zip’s orchestration layer gives agents precise directions, and humans full visibility. WIth access to 60+ systems, agents act with context, clarity, and control.
• Based on real customer pain points: Our agents were conceived and built in our AI Lab in partnership with visionary leaders from OpenAI, Canva, Webflow, and Wiz, in order to solve real, repeatable procurement problems.

Access to a deep and diverse data layer: AI agents are only as good as the data they can act on. Zip connects to a rich blend of internal records like vendor profiles, contracts, invoices, as well as external data from integrations like ERP systems and bank verification tools.

“We’ve worked closely with the Zip team to power their agentic platform and it’s been really exciting to see how quickly they’ve turned real-world procurement pain points into focused AI task agents with our APIs" _{- Kathryn Devlin, Head of Procure-to-Pay Operations, Travel and Expense at OpenAI}

Real examples of Zip’s agentic AI in action

Here are three examples of our 50+ AI agents actually do for you today. Remember, these aren’t theoretical use cases or vague copilots. These are real, embedable agents performing the real work of procurement.

Intake Validation Agent

Automatically scans purchase requests for issues like incorrect payment terms, missing data, or misaligned pricing, by cross-referencing uploaded documents, supplier records, and your company’s own policy library. Flags problems before they reach downstream approvers.

Tariff Analysis Agent

Analyzes how shifting global trade policies and tariffs impact the suppliers you rely on in real-time. Surfaces the true cost drivers hidden in your supply chain, so sourcing teams can make more informed, resilient decisions.

DORA Screening Agent

Detects whether a supplier falls under the scope of the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). If they do, the agent automatically kicks off the appropriate due diligence workflow, ensuring compliance before risk enters the business. This technology can be extended to compliance more broadly, including agents for GDPR, SOX, HIPAA, and other regulatory frameworks.

Each of these agents is built to do one job, and do it exceptionally well.

When specialized agents act within your orchestration layer, you eliminate guesswork, reduce friction, and create space for people to focus on strategy, not busywork.

And with Zip’s AI Agent Builder, you’re not limited to just the 50+ agents we’ve released. Our no-code platform lets you build, customize, configure, and deploy your own agents, tailored to your policies, systems, and use-cases.

What this means for the enterprise

Let’s be direct: procurement is still one of the most manual, time-consuming, and fragmented processes in business. It’s also the second-largest category of spend after payroll. This presents a huge opportunity for agentic AI.

• Billions in potential savings by faster approvals and smarter sourcing
• Millions of hours saved on intake validation, contract review, and supplier research
• Stronger compliance and risk protection with agents that never tire and never miss

This is how the best companies will operate in the future. And the future starts now.

The era of agentic procurement orchestration begins now

At Zip, our vision is simple: when procurement flows, business flows.

With today’s launch, we’re moving beyond simply orchestrating spend. This is a fundamental shift towards intelligent execution, where AI agents handle the manual work and your teams are freed to focus on the strategy that drives real impact.

Welcome to the next chapter. Let’s build it together.

‍Want to see Zip’s 50+ agents in action? Sign up for our agentic AI webinar on July 8.