Unlock document data with generative AI from Zip

Vendor relationships are critical enablers of competitive advantage for modern businesses. Over the past few years, procurement and finance teams have been elevated to strategic roles within organizations, tasked with ensuring agile access to suppliers amidst changing market conditions.

Yet maintaining vendor relationships is also hard work. Procurement and finance teams spend thousands of hours every year on manual data entry and review of contracts, order forms, POs, and security documents to ensure their businesses are getting the best deals and are being exposed to the least risk. 

This work is essential to delivering the strategic advantage businesses need from their vendors.  But, as the number of vendors businesses use continues to grow, there's a need now more than ever for innovative approaches to overcome bottlenecks and allow procurement and finance professionals to focus on what matters most.

Today, we are excited to announce a transformative solution to these bottlenecks with our first release of Zip AI, a new set of generative AI-based capabilities embedded into the core Zip platform. Available in Q4 to customers for early access, Zip AI empowers procurement and finance teams to eliminate manual data entry, gain insights into risks within contracts and security documents, and receive proactive recommendations for vendor consolidation opportunities.

And this is just the beginning. In the coming quarters, we'll release even more AI-driven capabilities within Zip. As Zip CEO Rujul Zaparde explained in our press announcement, “We’re committed to providing embedded AI solutions that are directly applicable to the day-to-day workflows our customers already love and use, so they can deliver meaningful competitive advantages for their businesses.” 

Launch Overview

Today’s launch announcement, which is focused on document intelligence and will be available to beta customers in Q4, will include:

• Automatic data extraction: Zip AI can instantly parse any document or contract for pricing details, payment terms, and line items with automatic data integrity checks.
• Automated legal and security risk reviews: Zip AI can scan contract and security documents for 100+ risks in seconds, and surface potential risks to cross-functional approvers directly in their review workflows.
• Vendor consolidation opportunities: Zip can flag requests for vendors that offer similar functionality to existing vendors a customer works with already. These insights are shown in requester and reviewer workflows, as well as across all active contracts. 

Here’s more on what you can expect from our three initial use cases.

Automated data extraction

Procurement and finance professionals spend thousands of hours each year on highly manual and error prone data entry to keep contract, vendor, and payment records up to date. Often this is done by finding the data inside “source of truth” documents such as order forms. 

Zip AI can instantly parse key metadata from any document, including price, payment terms, line items with automatic data integrity checks. On Day 1 of joining Zip and uploading your existing contracts, Zip AI will extract metadata from your order forms, ensuring an up-to-date vendor source of truth, and will schedule renewals leading to 100% renewals coverage.

Previously, companies had to seek out specialized vendors for advanced contract analytics in addition to their source-to-pay platforms. Zip AI embeds these capabilities into its Intake-to-Pay workflows, slashing cycle times and ensuring correct data entry from the outset. 

Instant risk and security reviews

IT and legal teams invest significantly in legal and security reviews as part of the purchase approval process, often involving manual scrutiny of documents like MSAs, NDAs, compliance audit reports, and compliance whitepapers. Teams that choose not to dedicate this time commitment simply accept that risks will go unnoticed

Zip AI automatically detects legal and security clauses that expose your company to risk from MSAs and Audit Reports, scanning these documents for 100+ risks in seconds. We’ve teamed up with leading legal and risk experts at companies with the most robust procurement legal and risk review processes to determine what risks to look for and which criteria are the most significant to flag for omission. 

On Day 1 of joining Zip and uploading your existing documents, customers will get a risk assessment across all audit reports and MSAs. Both mature teams handling a high volumes of vendor requests, as well as growing organizations without a dedicated third party risk review process will experience significant time savings. 

Vendor consolidation

With purchasing increasingly decentralized in modern organizations, vendor sprawl and redundant vendors are becoming harder to avoid — especially as the organization grows. Today, centralized procurement admins need to painstakingly review each purchase to avoid unnecessary vendors, or simply accept duplicative spend as a cost of doing business.

Zip AI puts an end to this complexity. When an employee submits a request for a new vendor, Zip assesses whether any existing vendors offer similar capabilities. If so, Zip encourages the employee to consider existing vendors. If they choose to use the new vendor, Zip AI flags any purchase requests that involve duplicative vendors, surfacing vendor consolidation opportunities to reviewers.

For those just starting out with Zip, any purchase requests or purchase orders with a duplicative vendor will be flagged by our AI on Day 1 upon uploading your existing contracts, after which Zip will surface all vendor consolidation opportunities to you.

This is just the beginning

While we’re excited to release these capabilities to beta customers today, Zip's journey with generative AI has just begun. 

To quote our CEO, Rujul Zaparde, “Generative AI is one of our top focuses at Zip. We think generative AI will fundamentally transform how requesters, cross-functional approvers, finance and procurement process owners experience the intake-to-pay process, and have made a big bet on leveraging generative AI to improve all aspects of our platform. This is just the beginning,” 

As we’ve seen in other technology sectors, generative AI represents a paradigm shift for how people interact with software. At Zip, we pride ourselves on being recognized as the first company to solve for the user experience of procurement. Our application of generative AI aims to further extend our lead in delivering groundbreaking experiences, whether starting with intake or extending to procure-to-pay and beyond. 

Ready to put Zip AI into action and modernize intake-to-pay processes? View our AI capabilities on our website, book a demo, or reach out to us at info@ziphq.com.