Tell me about OpenAI. Obviously it’ s a really exciting time to work in ai, so what is your role there? At OpenAI my focus is really on procurement transformation. So setting up the procurement of the future as part of our finance of the future initiatives. So my goal is to make it easy, faster, and safer to buy things in the company.

Which agents are you finding the most beneficial to work with? My team is the first reviewer of the procurement process. So, when a requester initiates a request, my team is tasked with reviewing the quality of the data – doing a sanity check to make sure that this makes sense; that these are the right reviewers; that the contract or documentation attached aligns to the needs of the request. That used to take 20-40 minutes to assess. So, the first agent I had them build for us was an intake validation agent that summarises all of that information, provides a recommendation and flags discrepancies across the board. What used to take us 20 minutes is now five minutes of taking the recommendation and making decisions.

Kat Devlin, Head of Procure-to-Pay, Travel & Expense, OpenAI

Tell us about OpenAI’ s partnership with Zip OpenAI is heavily invested in AI technology. When I started there about a year ago, Zip was not yet really embracing the concept of AI to move the needle. It had some things that were automated, but it was not really leveraging AI to help make decisions, to help with those complex pieces of procurement that require judgement.

They came back to me a few months later with this concept of agents and the ability for us to really reduce the mental load of our end users and help them make better decisions faster by summarising these complex deals, by giving them insights into risk reviews and sharing concepts about the deal that would’ ve been missed in a human review.

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