Trustpilot's Mike Cartwright on Streamlining Procurement

The emergence of AI has reshaped the procurement industry, particularly as it faces greater demand in the age of volatility. Now, teams can see greater speeds and efficiency throughout manual processes, creating more opportunity to build operational resilience. 

At Zip Forward London, more than 300 procurement and finance leaders had the opportunity to learn more about the trends shaping procurement and how to best plan for the future. 

At the event, Procurement Magazine spoke to Mike Cartwright, Director of Source-to-Pay at Trustpilot, to hear about how procurement is being revolutionised by new technology. 

Can you tell me about the relationship between Trustpilot and Zip?

The relationship between Trustpilot and Zip came about as we went through the transition stage of using many fragmented systems and processes. It wasn't the best environment for the teams and also the business to engage with procurement. We signed with Zip in October because it's best-in-class. It was clear through going to the RFPs and the whole setup with zip, talking through them for months that it was best-in-class and that's the reason why we signed with Zip.

So it's a really new relationship?

Oh, really fresh. Yeah, we're seven weeks into go-live. We signed in October and went straight into the full implementation phase. It's been great and we're seven weeks in from go-live. And like I mentioned before, people are talking about it — it's transformational for Trustpilot. The feedback from the stakeholders, they just say, "love Zip". Zip is like a really good tool. It's a very visible tool. They can see where their processes are, they can see where their invoices are, they can see everything end to end. Whereas before, it was like a black hole. You put a request into procurement, you had no idea what happened, where it went, or what was happening with it.

What has it meant for your new team?

I mean, it's been a stressful thing in terms of implementation, new systems, new processes, new ways of working because we literally redesigned it from the ground up. We didn't put our old processes into the system; we redesigned it from the ground up to work out how we make it streamlined, what we actually need to do and how to make it efficient. The team have got on board with that. They're learning the new process. So we're learning how to change things on the fly and we're changing the processes. So where it doesn't work, we can do it ourselves. We don't have to wait for an engineering team to come and fix it for us. The team are loving it; they love the visibility across the whole end to end. Procurement can now see AP stuff, AP can now see the procurement stuff. We're all in one system, and so they're loving it. 

How do you see it going forward? What does that next five years look like?

Well, Zip Pay is next. Well, actually, Zip and Brex. We've just done seven weeks of implementation, and we're now going into Zip and Brex. So Brex cards, that's going to be transformational because we then just go into a p-card, create it as part of the request and don't have to worry about vendor onboarding in terms of the banking verifications. We can move quicker when signing. And then we're looking at Zip Pay, and our payments into Zip as well. So that's this year alone.

We're looking at more agentic AI with the things that have been dropped today, and so those are going to be really key for how we shape procurement and accounts payable going forward. The stuff coming out of the AP side that's been announced today is revolutionising AP. So yeah, we're just going to keep growing and building with it. They keep dropping features all the time, so we just need to keep up with the feature growth. That's what we're going to keep doing: keep growing with it.

We were stagnant for so long with our old system. There was no development with our old procurement system, which was fragmented. There were no feature releases, there was no AI. It just wasn't there. Now we can see what we can do to improve. We can actually look at the right things at the right time, rather than look at everything. We can actually be targeted. It's just about prioritising where we are and what we want to do in the future. It's going to be that more strategic work, working with vendors and making sure we hold them to account to our contracts as well.