Why is it so important that so many people from procurement are here today? The theme of this year’ s zip forward is Agents of Change, and so it’ s just so incredible to have hundreds and hundreds of customers and community members here with us to really dig into how AI is redefining procurement.

Why is the future of procurement so exciting? Procurement for so many years has been bogged down in many ways by working through all of the repeatable, high-throughput manual tasks that everyone in procurement needs to do.

Those tasks really hold people back from doing the more strategic work, driving real value. I think deploying AI agents into the procurement workflow for the first time is really freeing up our customers. And we see this in the ROI. Our customers who are using agents are freed up to go focus on more of the strategic work. The much more repetitive, manual tasks – validating, checking the intake data is correct, comparing contracts and order forms – can, for the first time, be handled by AI, freeing people to work on the more strategic tasks.

Rujul Zaparde, CEO, Zip

How are you developing this software and where’ s it going over the next five years? When we looked at our data last year, our customers processed 20 million reviews through Zip and 96 % of those were manually approved entirely by human beings.

By 2030, we expect to be processing over a billion reviews a year. The goal we’ ve set for ourselves internally is that 90 % of those reviews should be assisted by AI. So, that’ s the opportunity we have ahead of us.

114 December 2025