Zip Unveils Powerful AI Enhancements to Transform Business Purchasing Helping Companies Save Time and Money, While Also Giving Them Better Control Over Spending

Customers Like OpenAI, Snowflake, and Sephora Have Saved Over $1.5 Billion on Zip in the Past Year Alone

Zip, the leading AI-powered spend orchestration platform, unveiled a powerful suite of new and enhanced AI capabilities that enable companies to gain control of their spending by streamlining procurement. Hundreds of industry leaders including Sephora, Discover, and Reddit — not to mention leading AI companies like OpenAI — use Zip to increase operational efficiency, generate hard savings, and reduce risk. Zip’s latest innovations build on these capabilities with a slew of new capabilities, including: “Zip AI assistant,” a generative AI procurement assistant; “AI document extraction,” which extracts and stores critical data from contracts; and “AI intake automation,” which uses AI to pre-fill purchase requests.

Customers Like OpenAI, Snowflake, and Sephora Have Saved Over $1.5 Billion on Zip in the Past

Procurement, which involves the acquisition of goods and services necessary for operations, is a critical function of today’s businesses. Each year, companies spend trillions of dollars on everything from office supplies and software subscriptions to professional services, infrastructure, and data center storage. However, the purchasing process is slow, complex, and riddled with inefficiencies, involving countless steps, extensive paperwork, and numerous approvals and security reviews. Zip’s AI-powered platform streamlines the entire procurement lifecycle, from initial request to final payment, thereby saving businesses valuable time and money, while enhancing spend visibility, risk management, and compliance.

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“Zip has become an indispensable tool for OpenAI’s procurement process,” said Hugh Drinkwater, OpenAI’s Head of Procurement. “We are thrilled Zip has integrated OpenAI’s technology to power their Zip AI suite to help us further reduce time spent on manual tasks, create a better buying experience and improve the productivity of our teams across the organization.”

With Zip’s suite of AI solutions, companies can eliminate thousands of employee hours and dramatically reduce the need for procurement, legal, security, finance, and IT teams to spend time on error-prone data entry and time-consuming vendor contract reviews. For example, Miro uses Zip AI to save time with the legal contract review process; Coinbase uses it to streamline millions of dollars of invoices per year; UCI Health is implementing it to rapidly scale contract conversions during a merger, ensuring inclusion of key stakeholders and continuity of patient care — allowing doctors and nurses to focus on providing life-saving medical treatment without administrative delays, or disruptions to services required.

The latest AI features bring even more advanced and impactful capabilities to Zip:

• AI assistant: Zip’s AI assistant guides employees through the purchasing process to reduce the time and effort required to navigate complex company spending policies. For example, if an employee wants to buy an Airtable software subscription for their team, they can send a message to Zip’s AI assistant as if messaging a coworker, and Zip AI will automatically start the purchase request, guiding them through what is needed to complete the request.
• AI document extraction: AI document extraction parses data from order forms, contracts and other documents to create a comprehensive, single source of truth. With AI document extraction, documents such as MSAs, DPAs, NDAs, SOWs, Amendments, and more can be scanned in seconds. This puts valuable information to work, so it can be used to automate tasks.
• AI intake automation: AI intake automation pre-fills purchase requests with data from order forms, eliminating manual data entry and saving time. Employees simply need to upload the order form they receive from their vendor to have key purchase and supplier information — such as price, item quantity, and billing frequency – automatically included in their purchase request, saving them valuable time and reducing the likelihood of errors.

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Today, Zip powers global payments in over 140 countries and has helped customers save almost $4.4 billion in the less than four years since the platform launched. In May 2023, Zip secured $100 million in Series C funding led by Y Combinator, with participation from CRV and Tiger Global, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. In a recent IDC study, organizations reported saving, on average, a staggering $14 million per year by using Zip.

“The problem with business purchasing today is that much of the process is still cumbersome and time consuming,” said co-founder and CTO Lu Cheng. “Zip’s generative AI capabilities change that, transforming this process by guiding employees through purchasing decisions, automating tedious tasks, and reducing the complexity of navigating company policies. This is a concrete use of generative AI that makes work faster, easier, and more efficient so that every team that touches the procurement lifecycle can focus on the real, strategic work that will move the needle.”