Zip’s Price Negotiation Agent projects millions in annual savings; conference brings together 700+ procurement leaders, including speakers from T-Mobile, Gap, Block, and more

Zip, the AI platform for procurement, unveiled a powerful new suite of AI agents at its third annual Zip Forward conference, including its most powerful agent yet: the Price Negotiation Agent, which helps companies identity overpayments and negotiate better deals across all categories of spend, from IT and software to professional services, real estate, and advertising. The two-day event brought together more than 700 procurement and finance leaders, including executives from T-Mobile, OpenAI, Gap, Block, Cloudflare, Dollar Tree, LinkedIn, Northwestern Mutual, Prudential and AMD to share insights on implementing AI agents in enterprise operations.

The two-day event brought together more than 700 procurement and finance leaders, including executives from T-Mobile, OpenAI, Gap, Block, Cloudflare, Dollar Tree, LinkedIn, Northwestern Mutual, Prudential and AMD.

Zip’s Price Negotiation Agent tackles one of procurement’s most persistent challenges. In enterprise purchasing, suppliers hold all the pricing cards. When companies pay vastly different prices for identical products, the difference isn’t about value, it’s about information. Suppliers know what everyone else pays; buyers don’t. Without market benchmarks, procurement teams don’t have the negotiation leverage they need, often leaving them with no choice but to overpay by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Price Negotiation Agent levels the playing field by analyzing both internal purchase history and external market benchmarks to provide data-backed negotiation guidance. When a procurement team needs to renew their marketing automation software, for example, the agent analyzes what the company paid historically, benchmarks against third party market intelligence and provides specific negotiation tactics on each contract.

The economics are massive: Cribl, a high-growth data observability platform used by 50% of the Fortune 100, projects 10-15% in total savings and nearly $3M in annual cost reductions by combining faster cycle times, smarter negotiations, and a self-negotiating model for non-strategic contracts that are collectively incredibly time-consuming.

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“Zip’s Price Negotiation Agent is allowing our team to focus on strategic priorities while laying the groundwork for a truly autonomous procurement process,” said Meteb Alfayez, Director of Procurement and Sourcing at Cribl. “We’re seeing meaningful efficiency gains – not only in negotiated outcomes, but in how quickly we can move and how much manual work we can automate.”

“We’re incredibly grateful to be working with procurement and finance leaders at the world’s most innovative organizations to transform decades-old procurement challenges into AI solutions that solve real problems,” said Lu Cheng, cofounder and CTO of Zip. “The Price Negotiation Agent addresses a gap that has cost companies millions: the lack of market intelligence needed to negotiate confidently. When a single AI agent can deliver this kind of economic impact, that’s AI delivering real value.”

Expanding AI Across the Procurement Lifecycle

Beyond price negotiation, Zip unveiled additional agents spanning the procurement journey, including a Preferred Vendor Agent that surfaces approved suppliers during intake and a suite of finance agents that automate accounts payable tasks like invoice-to-contract compliance checking.

The company also introduced conversational AI capabilities across its platform from intake to final payment. Instead of navigating lengthy forms, employees can now handle every step in the procurement process through plain language. Zip’s AI asks intelligent questions, reads uploaded documents, and automatically completes requests while providing instant policy answers.

“The procurement industry is at an inflection point with agentic AI. Now is the time to learn, adopt, and embrace AI,” said Dr. Elouise Epstein, Procurement Futurist at Kearney. “Zip Forward brings together the leaders who are actually implementing these technologies, not just talking about them. There’s tremendous value in learning from peers in-person. As humans, we learn through social interactions and connections.”