Q&A: Zip’s Rujul Zaparde on Investing in Procurement AI

Zip Forward London brought together more than 300 procurement and finance leaders. Over the space of one day, leaders had the opportunity to strategise and develop a bold new vision for the future of the industry. 

At the event, Procurement Magazine spoke to Rujul Zaparde, CoFounder and CEO at Zip to hear about investments in AI adoption across procurement.

Tell me about where we are today and what Zip Forward is?

We're at Zip Forward Europe and we are very excited that today we have announced our AI contract orchestration, to really bring AI to the buying side of contracting and the end-to-end procurement process. 

We've been continuing to really invest in the EMEA region more broadly, and so it's amazing to see so many prospects, customers and so many of our team members here.

Where are you seeing AI make an impact?

It's really in handling a lot of the routine, tactical, manual tasks that procurement has to do, tasks that prevent procurement from focusing on the more strategic. We've now deployed well over a thousand agents into production across our customer environments, very much focused on automating that work for them.

Where do you see Zip sitting in this revolution?

I'm biased, but I would certainly say that ultimately orchestration, intake and procurement orchestration is where the work originates and where the work gets done. 

And that is why it makes sense to have AI embedded at the orchestration layer. The orchestration layer also connects to more and more systems in the enterprise stack, and as a result, agents in Zip can deliver the most comprehensive insight for our customers.

You're investing very heavily. What is it that European customers need that you haven't seen elsewhere?

That's a great question. A lot more focus on risk, and a lot more focus on regulation. We've made so many investments there, and we have so many agents now that our customers in EMEA are actually using to manage their internal risk processes that fit inside their end-to-end procurement workflow.

So what are the results — the real ROI?

Our customers to date, having deployed over a thousand agents into production in their Zip environments, have seen over 800,000 hours saved and over US$59m of cost avoidance and savings.