Q&A: Anna Zhong, Zip Explores Contract Orchestration

In an era defined by volatility and constant change, procurement leaders gathered at Zip Forward to discuss the trends and events shaping the industry.

More than 300 procurement and finance leaders gathered to share insights, develop new visions and form strategies.

At the event, Procurement Magazine spoke to Anna Zhong, Principal Product Manager at Zip, about contract orchestration. 

You've just launched the contract orchestration project. What is the core pain point that you're solving for procurement?

It's really exciting that we launched the product. The core pain points that we're solving for are reducing the bottleneck that is contract review for procurement and legal teams. We want to empower procurement teams to be able to do a lot of the contract review themselves for low-risk contracts, or have it automated with AI, and reduce the amount of work that legal teams need to do. So it's kind of helping both of those functions.

And on top of that, I think what's unique about building this contracting platform on Zip is that it leverages all of the procurement data that already lives inside Zip. So all of the data from the purchase requests, all of your spend data, that is what is being taken in from the AI's context as it's doing its analysis for contract reviews and generation.

So how is that AI helping to reduce the busy work on the teams?

It starts with companies setting up their own positions for what are the standard or accepted language for different clauses and different terms. Once you have that, then our AI can use that to do a first pass of analysing contracts. And, you know, once again, when you're setting up those terms, you can also set up logic for how you want to route that to different stakeholders inside the company.

It's not just whether the term was flagged or not, but also more complex logic around potentially attributes on the request, whether the request is high-risk or low-risk, etc. And once the request is actually submitted, then the AI starts reasoning through all of that logic, and it can figure out where to route certain clauses to the right people.

Can you tell us about some of your early customer case studies and how the product has transformed their teams?

We've been working with a lot of early customers to solve different pain points that they have with contracting. Some of them, as I mentioned earlier, the core pain point is actually just legal teams are spending too much time doing contract review. So we have launched some review agents that help triage whether legal should be involved or not.

And then some other companies have more complex use cases around their repository, and so they've also found Zip to be really helpful because our AI automatically extracts metadata and clauses in a structured fashion and organises them into contract families in the Zip repository. So, we have people who are using contract orchestration to solve for the pre-signature workflows and then some that are using it to solve for repository and post-signature.

And what sort of results are you getting in those early customer studies?

We have a customer who was able to cut out external legal contracting hours by 50%. We also had a customer who was able to cut down their NDA review cycles or other contract review cycles by also actually more than 50%. So, we're already seeing a lot of early results in reducing cycle times. What we want to see in the future as we continue building out the product is the reduction in spend leakage.