How Zip's AI Superagents Automate Procurement End-to-End | Rujul Zaparde

Rujul Zaparde (0:00)

We can automate a lot of transactional work, but someone convincing another person about doing something and making initiative out of it and running a project, I don't see any AI doing that.

Craig S. Smith (0:09)

I'm hearing a lot of reticence. I mean, everyone's kind of afraid of agents right now. Two of your customers are Anthropic and OpenAI, who certainly could build this themselves.

Rujul Zaparde (0:21)

It's very easy for enterprise to say, of course we're using AI, but the reality is organizations that deploy AI work deeply across their processes, versus just they say they're piloting AI or whatever. I see 39% ROI, if I remember, versus 6% ROI.

Craig S. Smith (0:37)

Do you think about that at all, how the overall economy is going to change?

Rujul Zaparde (0:43)

Our plan when we started Zip was always to orchestrate the work that procurement encapsulates, so that we can understand the work, so that we can eventually help you do the work. And that takes us to today and to super agents. And if you think about what the procurement process actually comprises of, you could probably break down 80-ish percent of the procurement process into a series of relatively discrete straightforward tasks. There's just a lot of transactional work, and I'll give you some examples. If you're doing business, if you're a company and you're doing business with a new supplier, you're probably going to need to process a W-9 or a W-8 type of document and make sure it's compliant. It's not more than three years out of day. You might need to, if someone in your organization is procuring, they want to buy some new AI product, some new software product.

Eventually, someone in IT will have to review a SOC 2 report, that they're going to route or stamp or say, wait a minute, there's like, I think we got to take another look at this thing. Either way, that's a relatively discrete task that can be automated with an agent. Our original iteration of agents in Zip about a year, a year and change ago, was to actually have many different little sort of discrete agents, if you will, that can be dropped at the workflow that do all these discrete things. But we realized that those agents were one-shot agents. Like a SOC 2 review agent, we have a certain set of prompts, it would result in an output, and then the human, you could have it autopilot, or the human would be brought in to take a look and approve or not. But there's follow up. A lot of these things require more back and forth. And so with super agents that we announced a few months ago, we prioritize really sort of discrete persona. So for example, you can think of the legal super agent in zip, can autonomously handle an entire end-to-end redlining process. It's connected to your email with MCP. It can send an email on your behalf to the supplier or to their legal counsel, process a redline, wait for them to come back, so on and so forth. And you can kind of like really take a lot of the human out of the work because AI for the first time in this process, at least, handle more of the end-to-end work versus subcomponents of the work.

And so that's that's something that we've been really excited about.

But you did mention, Craig, like, you know, procurement, you're right. Like, I always describe it, you know, as every business in the world, by definition, has to procure things, right? Like there's money coming in, should be revenue.

And then, you know, when you think about money going out, the top two buckets are always payroll and procurement. And in certain companies, like tech companies, most likely, payroll comes first, procurement comes second. You look at more traditional industries, manufacturing, et cetera. Almost certainly, procurement will come first. Payroll will come second. And then after a long, long, long gap, you have things like T&E and other things. But it's a very, very large area of spend for all businesses.

Craig S. Smith (3:52)

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