Introducing AI Contract Orchestration

Today we’re announcing AI Contract Orchestration, a new way to automate supplier contract review, negotiation, and compliance, designed to eliminate the manual back-and-forth that costs companies millions in legal fees and procurement delays every year.

Any time a new supplier is needed, the same slow process kicks in: a contract bounces between procurement and legal, redlines are exchanged across inboxes, and all the while approvals are chased through fragmented systems. As procurement teams are left waiting, legal teams spend hours reinforcing the same policies and clauses across thousands of agreements every year.  

The tools both teams have been given were never built to eliminate busy work, just organize it.

‍Zip’s AI Contract Orchestration changes this.

Manual contract review costs more than just legal time

Most companies sign contracts and move on. This often means terms get buried and renewal dates pass unnoticed. What was agreed to in writing diverges from what’s being paid or delivered, and no one catches it until the leverage is gone.

This is the domain of contract obligation management, and until now, no system has owned it end-to-end. Zip’s AI Contract Orchestration changes that, flagging bad terms before signature, and actively surfacing what’s owed, expiring, or at risk before payment or renewal forces the issue.

Zip currently processes over one million contract reviews annually, representing more than a billion dollars in legal review time, the vast majority spent on routine agreements. AI Contract Orchestration automates that work at scale.

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Why buy-side contract management needs its own solution

Most contract management tools were built for the sell-side: helping sales teams push their own paper through signature faster. 

Buy-side contracting is a fundamentally different problem. When you're the buyer, you're reviewing the other party's terms, not your own. You're managing risk across hundreds of supplier agreements, each with different structures, jurisdictions, and compliance requirements. And critically, you're coordinating across two teams who have to live with the contract long after signature: procurement and legal.

That's why AI Contract Orchestration is built directly into Zip's procurement workflow. The AI has context that standalone contracting tools simply don't: who's requesting the supplier, what category the spend falls into, what the risk profile looks like, and what your legal playbook says about all of it, even before the contract arrives.

How AI contract orchestration automates supplier contract review

The moment an employee requests a new supplier, Zip's AI already has full context. By the time a contract arrives, the analysis is underway.

• AI-suggested redlines compare incoming contracts against pre-approved playbooks and auto-suggest markups before review begins. 
• AI contract review surfaces risk across liability, data privacy, termination, and more with a risk summary and recommended actions.
• Intelligent triage routes contracts by type and risk level, moving low-risk agreements through automatically and escalating complex ones with context attached.
• AI contract generation lets legal teams draft contract language directly in Zip, grounded in playbooks and historical agreements.

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The results: 51% faster contract cycle times

Early customers like Dollar Tree, N26, and Bandwidth, are already beginning to see results. Across the board, AI Contract Orchestration is reducing contract cycle times by 55%, cutting manual contract requests in half, and reducing outside legal contractor hours by 50%.

"Zip's AI Contract Orchestration tool has been a game changer for our team," said Cathy Reynolds, Director of Global Sourcing Vendor Management at Bandwidth. "We've already seen our NDA turnaround decrease by 60%. It’s a dramatically improved workflow."

Industry analysts are taking note of what makes Zip's approach different. 

"Implementation, adoption, and user experience are the biggest issues plaguing traditional CLM," said Nikhil Gaur, Director of Strategic Projects & Research Analyst at The Hackett Group. 

"Zip's new Contract Orchestration solution solves all of these. Moreover, the functionalities go beyond contract review workflows to incorporate post-signature activities such as obligations and renewals, which are typically where organizations require the most value from technology."

Zip AI procurement orchestration makes this work

Because Zip’s procurement automation platform already connects intake, approvals, supplier data, and payments, AI Contract Orchestration fits naturally into how teams already work. Contracting becomes an embedded part of the process rather than a siloed document.

If your procurement team is waiting on redlines that take days instead of minutes, if your legal team is buried in routine supplier agreements, if renewals are slipping through because no one's watching the terms, this is what we built it for.

AI Contract Orchestration is available now. Reach out today to request a demo.

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Save your seat for a live webinar May 19th, 2026 walking you through how AI Contract Orchestration can automate buy-side contracting.

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