Zip Forward 2025: Zip Founders, Rujul Zaparde & Lu Cheng

Over 700 procurement leaders gathered in San Francisco for Zip Forward, the third annual conference hosted by AI procurement platform Zip. Set in the heart of the city, the event brought the procurement community together under this year's theme: Agents of Change.

The theme explores how procurement and finance leaders are transforming business operations through AI, orchestration and decisive action. During the opening keynote – which shared the conference's title – Zip's leadership team demonstrated how their platform enables procurement teams to drive meaningful organisational change.

During the opening session, both Rujul Zaparde and Lu Cheng, Co-Founders of the company were on stage, both looking at where the company has been and where it is heading.

After the opening keynote came to an end, both leaders sat down with Procurement Magazine to discuss what was announced on stage.

Why is it so important that so many people from procurement are here at Zip Forward 2025?

Rujul: The theme of this year's Zip forward is Agents of Change, and it's just so incredible to have hundreds and hundreds of customers and community members here with us to really dig into how AI is redefining procurement.

AI is the talk of the industry at the moment. So what have Zip launched today in that space?

Lu: So today we announced a next generation intake experience, leveraging AI to power, and it really re-transforms the requester experience in three key ways. 

First, it automatically and intelligently routes requesters to the right purchasing path, eliminating guesswork. 

Second, it automatically pre-fills intake, by leveraging AI to extract key information from documents and freeform text input.

Third, it automatically and instantly answers requester questions throughout the entire purchasing process.

All of this combined transforms and reimagines the requester experience in a seamless and frictionless way.

How did you identify the pain points that you were going to address with this new solution?

Lu: What we found was, that we all know that they're frequent requesters and infrequent requesters. Intake works really well for frequent requesters, but for infrequent requesters, they don't know where to start, what the process actually is, which leads to a lot of questions like, how do I start the process? What is the status of my request? I have 5,000 GL codes, which one do I actually pick or can I pay for this vendor with my credit card? 

All of that leads to a lot of confusion. When we took a step back, talked to many of our enterprise customers that we have today, we realised it's a really common thread and problem that existed across all of our customers.

Let's talk about the future of procurement, where are we going from here?

Rujul: Procurement, for so many years, has been bogged down in many ways.

By working through all of the repeatable, high throughput, manual tasks, that everyone in procurement needs to do. Those tasks hold people back from doing the more strategic work, driving real value.

I think deploying AI agents into the procurement workflow for the first time, (is) really freeing up our customers. We see this in the ROI, our customers, who are using agents today, they're actually freed up to go focus on more of the strategic work.

Because, the much more repetitive manual tasks, like validating that the intake data is correct, comparing contracts and order forms, AI for the first time can handle that stuff and free people to work on the more strategic.

How are you developing this software and where do you think it's going to go next in the next five years?

Rujul: The goal that we've really set for ourselves is, when we looked at our data last year, our customers processed 20 million reviews through Zip, and 96% of those were manually approved entirely by human beings. 

By 2030, we expect to be processing over a billion reviews a year. And the goal that we've set for ourselves internally is that 90% of those reviews should be assisted by AI.

That's really the opportunity that we have ahead of us.