Which Zip agents are you finding most beneficial? The first agent we have is the price negotiation agent, which seems to be a hot product. The second agent is the hotel contract agent.

We use the price negotiation almost on every software today. It takes data from reliable thirdparty sources that have done 50-100 negotiations on the same company name, then brings that back, takes our contract data and then checks it against each other and then gives us an average on that price.

Speaking on ROI, in terms of money we’ re projecting to see US $ 3m in savings annually. And in terms of time, we look at it as three hour savings on each request, from saving us from going benchmarking, pinging other third-party tools, networking – all done in 30 seconds within the press of a button.

Hotel contracts are very complex to read. There’ s room taxes, food and beverage, all kinds of percentages. The hotel contract agent takes the contract, reads it, gives you a summary and then guides you on how much you should raise the purchase request for.

It then helps you understand the contract commercials in a minute or two, including the reading time.

These are the two most important agents. They’ re being used frequently and are highly adopted in our company.

Aside from saving time and money, what other benefits do such agents bring? Building these agents might take you time the first time because you want to make sure the data is right and that it’ s working correctly. But, after you build the agent, it’ s a matter of pressing a button that will give you the answer. Pressing a button might be difficult for some people, but for us it’ s been very, very easy – it takes a second.

When I think about procurement long term, my vision is to think about it as air traffic control in an airport. I want to focus on strategy, creating relationships and being a proactive team. The agents can run the operation, run the motion of that air traffic tower, so I can buy time for my folks. They can focus and spend it with our internal customers.

I always say, the long-term vision is we don’ t want to replace people with AI agents. We want to empower them and buy them more time.

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