Can you tell me what the biggest changes have been to supplier management this year? Our mission as a team focused on supplier management is just to make it as easy as possible for buyers and suppliers to work together. And as you can imagine, supplier management really happens throughout the entire end-to-end purchasing process.

The themes that we’ re really focused on for this upcoming year and that we have been as well for this past year. The first is around making the supplier lifecycle management a lot more compliant and also accurate, up to date. We’ ve done that by actually incorporating more dedicated workflows for supplier onboarding updates and offboarding, being able to automatically trigger those when helpful, being able to have the right approval controls in place and ensure proper ERP sync as well.

Which of Zip’ s agents are you particularly excited about? I think one in particular that people are really excited about is the SOC 2 summary agent. As you may know, a SOC 2 can be 100-plus pages. This AI agent will help summarise all of those SOC 2 findings in an actionable way against SOC 2 trust criteria and any other criteria you might have as a company.

We also have another agent that is particularly exciting for customers: our adverse media agent. You can monitor different public news sources and other forms of data to check for negative coverage to make sure you’ re mitigating reputational risk to your company.

The last one I’ ll highlight is our W-8 and W-9 validation agent, which can extract information from a W-8 or W-9 and verify it seamlessly against submitted or collected supplier information.

You can run all of these agents out of the box, but the beauty is that they’ re also customisable, so you can also tailor them to your company’ s use case.

What, in your eyes, is the future of procurement? I’ m very excited about AI agents and seeing how we can embed those not just on the buyer side for our customers, but also on the supplier side.

For example, the W-9 agent – if we were able to incorporate that on the supplier side and check for something like signature completion, it’ s actually more efficient if you tell a supplier that and have them run it. Then, you’ re not getting an incomplete W-9 and having to send it back to the supplier and have them fix it. Doing that on the supplier side is more efficient and we would love to enable that as well.

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