How Zip is Streamlining Contract Reviews

Leading AI platform Zip has announced a new contract orchestration tool to help procurement reclaim the hours lost to manual reviews.

Zip, the leading AI platform for enterprise procurement, launched AI Contract Orchestration at Zip Forward Europe in London. The solution automates supplier contract review, negotiation and compliance, eliminating the manual back-and-forth that costs companies millions in legal fees and procurement delays every year.

Zip is trusted by hundreds of industry leaders – including Anthropic, AMD, Northwestern Mutual, Dollar Tree and OpenAI – to orchestrate their procurement process. AI Contract Orchestration brings that same intelligence into contracting for the first time, with AI agents that don’t just assist the work, they do it.

Eliminating the bottleneck in supplier onboarding

Every company buys goods and services, yet every new supplier triggers the same agonisingly slow cycle. Requests vanish into email threads, contracts bounce between procurement and legal and redlines are exchanged across disjointed inboxes while approvals are chased through fragmented systems.

Procurement teams are left in limbo while legal departments spend thousands of hours manually reinforcing the same standard policies.

The tools provided to these teams were never designed to eliminate busy work; they were built merely to organise it.

The problem only compounds once the ink is dry. Most organisations sign a contract and immediately lose sight of its contents. Terms get buried in archives, renewal dates pass unnoticed and the hard-won pricing negotiated at the start is rarely enforced.

What was agreed to in writing quietly diverges from the actual payments and deliveries, and these discrepancies often go unnoticed until the company's leverage has completely evaporated.

This gap in oversight defines the domain of contract obligation management, a field that has lacked an end-to-end solution until now. Zip’s AI Contract Orchestration fundamentally changes this dynamic by flagging unfavourable terms before a signature is even applied.

Once a deal is live, the system actively surfaces what is owed, what is expiring and what is at risk long before a looming payment or renewal deadline forces a rushed decision.

Automating legal workloads at scale

Zip currently processes well over 1 million contract reviews annually through its platform. When considering an average attorney billing rate of US$300 per hour and a typical four-hour review cycle, this volume represents an estimated US$1.32bn in legal review time, with the vast majority squandered on routine, repetitive agreements. AI Contract Orchestration is Zip’s solution to automating that labour at scale, providing a streamlined path for legal, procurement and every stakeholder involved in the lifecycle of a contract.

“Contracts don’t need to be managed, they need to be orchestrated,” says Rujul Zaparde, Co-founder and CEO of Zip.

“There are so many people involved in the supplier contract process: procurement, legal, finance, risk, insurance, and marketing. Until now, the contract was the only thing everyone had in common, and even that lived in five different places.

"With AI Contract Orchestration, we’re giving those teams an AI solution that doesn’t just store agreements, but actively coordinates the reviews, stakeholders, and decisions around them so companies can move faster, enforce what they’ve negotiated, and get ahead of risk before it becomes a problem.”

Zip starts at the request. The moment an employee asks for a new supplier, Zip’s AI already has full context: the intake data, the supplier profile, the spend category, the risk classification and the company’s own legal playbook. By the time a contract arrives for review, the analysis is already underway and the agents are already doing the work:

• AI-suggested redlines aligned to company playbooks: When a supplier contract comes in, Zip’s AI compares it against pre-approved legal playbooks and auto-suggests redlines. Teams see exactly where the contract falls outside acceptable terms before review begins, cutting the time spent on first-pass markups.
• AI contract review and risk detection: Zip reviews the full contract and surfaces risk across key categories including liability, data privacy and termination. Each review includes a risk summary and recommended actions, so teams can prioritise and act faster.
• Intelligent contract triage and automatic routing: Zip evaluates every incoming contract by type and risk level, then routes it to the right team for sign-off. Standard, low-risk agreements move through automatically. Higher-risk contracts are escalated to the right reviewer with context already attached.
• AI contract generation: Legal teams can generate first-draft contract language directly in Zip, grounded in pre-approved playbooks and historical agreements. Drafts can be tailored by contract type, counterparty and deal terms, reducing time spent on initial drafting.
• End-to-end contract compliance: Pre-signature, contract terms are embedded directly into catalogue, PO and invoice workflows so spend limits and compliance are enforced; post-signature, supplier obligations are tracked automatically through the full contract lifecycle.

Delivering tangible efficiency gains

Early customers like Dollar Tree, N26 and Bandwidth are already realising significant gains from this technology. On average, AI Contract Orchestration is accelerating the business by reducing contract cycle times by 51% and cutting manual contract requests by half. Furthermore, organisations are seeing a 50% reduction in hours billed by outside legal contractors. Because Zip functions as the central hub of the procurement workflow – unifying intake, approvals, supplier data and payments – AI Contract Orchestration integrates seamlessly into existing team habits rather than adding another layer of complexity.

“Zip’s Contract Orchestration tool has been a game changer for our team,” adds Cathy Reynolds, Director of Global Sourcing Vendor Management at Bandwidth.

“Previously, we were routing through Ironclad to DocuSign just to create a template. Now for the first time, we’re truly on the same page – all of our contracts are in one place, with complete clarity from start to finish. We’ve already seen our NDA turnaround decrease by 60%. It’s a dramatically improved workflow.

Nikhil Gaur, Director of Strategic Projects & Research Analyst at The Hackett Group, says: “Implementation, adoption and user experience are the biggest issues plaguing traditional CLM.

“Zip’s new Contract Orchestration solution solves all of these given Zip’s well-deserved reputation for rapid implementations, cross-functional adoption, and ease of use. Moreover, the functionalities go beyond contract review workflows to incorporate post-signature activities such as obligations and renewals, which are typically where organisations require the most value from technology.”