The conversation around AI is no longer the impact it will have, but how quickly it will redefine enterprise operations. Zip has already moved beyond the experimental phase of AI to deliver tangible, bottom-line results for some of the world’s biggest organisations.

In 2025, Zip introduced AI procurement orchestration, a move that saw the launch of more than 50 specialised AI agents designed to autonomously handle tasks across procurement, finance, legal, IT and security. The impact on productivity has been nothing short of transformative.

"The results have been incredible," says Zip CEO, Rujul Zaparde. "Customers including OpenAI, Canva and Northwestern have saved more than 800,000 hours and $59M with Zip's AI suite."

However, according to Rujul, these efficiencies are just the baseline. As 2026 unfolds, the roadmap for procurement is moving from simple task automation to a higher-order intelligence that could see the traditional manual review process become a relic of the past.

The 2030 vision: A billion reviews

While many leaders are focused on the immediate quarter, Rujul is looking toward the turn of the decade. Zip’s long-term strategy is built on the premise that the sheer volume of procurement data will soon outpace human capacity.

"Zip’s boldest move for 2026 is the next step toward our long-term AI vision. We believe that by 2030, we’ll be processing more than a billion reviews annually – contract reviews, supplier risk assessments, approvals – and that 90%+ of those will be either AI-assisted or fully automated by AI,” he explains.

This transition hasn't happened overnight. It is the result of a deliberate, incremental build-out that Zip has spearheaded over the last three years. The journey began with AI assistance, providing a co-pilot for human users. This evolved into core agents, and eventually to the launch of its agent builder platform. This platform allows enterprises to extend and customise agents to fit their unique internal processes.

"Now we’re entering a new phase and moving from task-specific agents toward something more powerful: agents capable of receiving broad requirements, formulating multi-step plans and identifying the right tools or sub-agents to execute them," says Rujul. 

"It’s less about a single agent doing a single task and more about higher-order agents that can think, plan and orchestrate."

Proactive risk management in the AI era

One of the most pressing concerns for Chief Procurement Officers today is the volatility of the global risk landscape. From regulatory changes like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) to sudden shifts in tariffs, procurement teams are often in a reactive firefighting mode.

Currently, Zip’s AI agents work to uncover risks in specific silos, analysing a particular clause in a contract or assessing a supplier against a specific regulation. The 2026 evolution, however, involves a shift toward proactive sensing.

Rujul says that Zip’s orchestration-based capability will soon allow customers to sense risk events as they happen and automatically deploy the necessary digital workforce.

"A risk that affects a regulatory standard might ping the contract review agent to go through your entire repository and that might trigger another agent to draft emails to suppliers asking them to update or amend their contracts," Rujul explains.

This multi-step planning is not just a Zip-specific trend; it mirrors the frontier of AI research being conducted by giants like Anthropic and OpenAI – both of whom are Zip customers and partners.

"That kind of multi-step process and planning is what we’re seeing in the larger market right now with Anthropic and OpenAI pushing new tools for knowledge work, and Zip is very much on that path too," Rujul says. 

"Both companies are Zip customers and partners, which means we have the unique advantage of working closely with them as we develop our own AI agents. That proximity to the frontier of AI research directly shapes how our platform evolves."

2026: The year of the AI platform

If 2024 was the year of AI hype and 2025 the year of the pilot, Rujul believes 2026 will be the year of the AI platform. 

This is the point where enterprises will realise that AI cannot simply be bolted on to legacy systems of record. Instead, a new layer is required – a middle layer that provides governance, context and auditability.

For the procurement audience, this is a critical distinction. Procurement orchestration is not about making a user interface look better or connecting two pieces of software. It is becoming the foundation for the enterprise.

"To make AI valuable and safe at scale, you need a governance and control layer," Rujul insists. 

"One that ensures AI decisions are regulated by fixed workflows, where everything happens consistently and compliantly every time. You need full context into not just what decisions were made, but how and why they were made – feeding clean, accurate, auditable data back into your systems of record while giving AI the context it needs to operate safely and intelligently."

The internet of agents

With the fear that a company’s tech stack will become more fragmented, CPOs are increasingly looking for ways to blend best-of-breed tools without creating data silos. Zip’s vision for this is the internet of agents.

In this future, Rujul believes the competitive advantage lies not just in the software you own, but in how effectively your agents can talk to other agents, both internal and external.

"Your agents will need to be able to work with other agents," says Rujul. "It could be procurement agents working with supplier agents in a sourcing negotiation. Zip helps you build hybrid stacks that bridge those different worlds and perspectives by building the agentic tech stack of the future."

This global transformation is already underway. With Zip’s new London office, the company is seeing diverse levels of adoption across the UK and Europe, driven by varying regulatory environments and process maturities. To support this, Zip has launched an Enterprise Transformation Office (ETO), staffed by former CPOs from the Fortune 500 and Global 2000, including leaders from UnitedHealth Group and Sanofi.

"It’s not just about powerful software," Rujul notes. "Enterprises adopting agentic AI need strategic partners who understand the complexity of change at scale, and between the Enterprise Transformation Office and our Zip AI Lab, we’re bringing both the strategic and technical expertise to do that."

From spend management to spend strategy

By automating the grunt work and providing proactive insights, AI allows procurement leaders to move from being executors of spend to architects of strategy.

Rujul envisions an "intelligent enterprise operating system" that becomes more "alive" over time, proactively surfacing opportunities rather than waiting for a human to run a report.

"What that looks like in practice is agents that proactively identify opportunities for spend consolidation, flag supplier risks or performance issues before they become problems, and propose actions – like resourcing or engaging a secondary supplier," Rujul concludes. 

"Agents that see working capital optimisation opportunities and suggest ways to improve payment terms, use virtual cards or leverage dynamic discounting to help the bottom line. Procurement leaders won’t just be freed to do more, they’ll be augmented to advise at a level that wasn’t previously possible."