Bandwidth automates vendor management with zero added headcount 

The Challenge

When Cathy Reynolds joined Bandwidth in 2021 as Director of Global Sourcing & Vendor Management, the company had no procurement organization. The newly hired team built the function from scratch, using standard document management tools to store contracts and manually sending documents to numerous stakeholders for input.

As procurement matured, the team adopted Zip for intake and brought in a document management repository for contract lifecycle management. While the two tools were technically integrated, the experience was initially fragmented. Once a request moved into the repository for redlining, stakeholders had difficulty tracking versions. Multiple document draft versions lived in the repository, and only the final signed copy was uploaded to Zip. This resulted in inefficiencies tracking  contract status, rendering the procurement team into de facto project managers. 

Any email exchange with a vendor, round of redlines, or back-and-forth on language was a manual process outside Zip. During high-pressure moments like end-of-month pushes, the team’s inboxes and Slack channels would flood with stakeholders constantly pinging for status updates.

“Before, a lot of changes happened in the background,” Cathy says. “We were constantly asking, what are we waiting on? That has come to the forefront dramatically now.” The team wanted to bring contracting fully into Zip — not as an integration with a separate tool, but as a native, seamless part of the procurement experience.

The Solution

Zip’s AI Contract Orchestration 

A long-time Zip customer, Bandwidth recently began using Zip’s AI Contract Orchestration to accelerate contract cycle times, improve visibility, and reduce risk. Cathy shares, “Having all of our contract workflows in one place is just such a time saver. The clarity is everything.”

The rollout was phased, with the team prioritizing the capabilities that would have the biggest immediate impact. NDA templates were among the first to go live, immediately collapsing what had been a multi-tool process into a streamlined, templated workflow inside Zip. Redlining and vendor communication followed, fundamentally changing how procurement and other stakeholders interacted with their vendors.

Streamlining vendor communication proved to be one of the most impactful changes. When Bandwidth’s procurement team sends out redlined documents, vendor responses now flow automatically back into Zip, eliminating manual forwarding and chasing follow-ups. Reviewers and requesters can check the request at any time and see exactly where things stand. “I don’t have to be a middleman to make sure time sensitive contracts get to the proper team,” Cathy says. “It is always available.”

AI-powered workflows

Alongside AI Contract Orchestration, Bandwidth has activated three AI agents within Zip to streamline other workflows across procurement:

• Adverse Media Agent: Surfaces vendor risk signals, including data and regulatory red flags, before contracts even reach further stages of review. “This isn’t information that our teams had available while we’re having these talks of possibly onboarding a new vendor,” Cathy says. The agent has already flagged moderate-to-poor risk signals on prospective vendors, allowing Bandwidth stakeholders to make more informed engagement decisions.

• SOC 2 Analysis Agent: Automatically breaks down complex security audit documents, saving Bandwidth’s information security team from manually reviewing tedious reports. “Anytime you can break down a 98-page document… that’s awesome,” Cathy notes.

• Price Negotiation Agent: Leverages the full history of Bandwidth’s vendor documentation inside Zip to generate percentage-change benchmarks at renewal time, which previously required manual team effort. 

The Result

The impact of AI Contract Orchestration has resulted in serious time savings, efficiency, and visibility for Bandwidth.

With Zip’s templated workflows and DocuSign integration, NDA turnaround times were reduced by 60%, removing the friction of routing documents across separate systems. The team has also been able to eliminate legacy toolsfrom their tech stack.

End-of-month and end-of-quarter historically signify the busiest periods for Bandwidth’s procurement team. With AI Contract Orchestration, Cathy estimates each team member saves roughly two hours per week that previously went toward fielding status-update requests from stakeholders. “We’re no longer project managers, so we’re freed to be more strategic,” she says.

The review workflows between procurement, information security, privacy, and legal have also improved. With first-pass redlines and version history now visible within Zip, legal can pick up where procurement left off without redundant back-and-forth. “We’re not stepping on each other’s feet,” Cathy shares. 

On the security and risk side, Zip’s AI Agents has introduced a layer of vendor due diligence that was a significant manual effort before, surfacing reputational and legal risks earlier before agreements are signed, ultimately giving stakeholders and reviewers a shared view of potential exposure.

Bandwidth’s procurement team sees continued opportunity as AI Contract Orchestration features mature. The team is actively working to customize Zip’s AI document metadata fields to reflect Bandwidth’s specific contracting standards, moving from out-of-the-box metadata scans to policy-driven, automated compliance checks.

For the team that built procurement from scratch — and now manages a growing portfolio of vendor relationships with AI-powered insights — Zip has become the operating system for how Bandwidth contracts, collaborates, and manages risk.