THE PROCUREMENT INTERVIEW
Partnering with a university professor who had previously worked with Google’ s co-founders, Zycus developed an initial AI solution called AutoClass, which proved transformative, helping to classify trillions of dollars-worth of spend.
“ It was not a hammer in search of a nail,” Aatish emphasises.“ We had a problem, we wanted to solve the problem and we said,‘ why not look at some innovative ways of doing it?’ That’ s how we looked at AI and procurement.”
Understanding agentic AI While generative AI has captured global attention, Aatish advocates for a more structured approach through agentic AI:“ Everything is a layer on top of each other. So, you have LLM, which is ChatGPT, which is generative AI. Agentic AI is nothing but the structure which is put on top of generative AI.”
The distinction becomes clearer through his comparison to the industrial revolution.
“ You could think of LLM as the first industrial revolution,” Aatish continues.“ To convert that power, you really had to create processes and factories and assembly lines in a similar way. Agentic AI is harnessing the power of generative AI, but then putting it in structured agents.”
These structured agents can work in sequences or parallel, collaborating to achieve specific business objectives. Just as steam engines required careful process design to produce chemicals
22 November 2025