Eye On A.I. · Oct 24, 2026 · 51m · 43m saved
With Rujul Zaparde, co-founder and CEO, Zip
Photo via zip.com
Zip has processed roughly $1.2 trillion in cumulative spend approved across its corporate customers since launching in 2020.
Most procurement software still waits for a person to click approve at every step. Rujul Zaparde, co-founder and CEO of Zip, built agents that negotiate with suppliers, redline contracts over email and only call in a human when talks stall.
"We can automate a lot of transactional work, but someone convincing another person about doing something and making an initiative out of it and running a project — I don't see any AI doing that."
Rujul co-founded FlightCar as a college dropout and sold its technology to Mercedes-Benz in 2016, then co-founded Zip in 2020 after seeing procurement's pain points first-hand at Airbnb.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 51 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 7 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Zip has processed roughly $1.2 trillion in cumulative spend approved across its corporate customers since Rujul and co-founder Lou started the company in 2020
Zip's new "super agents" now run an entire procurement process end-to-end, replacing the narrow, one-shot agents that could only handle discrete tasks inside the roughly 80% of procurement that's transactional
Procurement tolerates almost no AI error because mistakes flow straight into the general ledger and the P&L, unlike a slightly-off marketing email
Zip has built 350 distinct permission types that apply equally to humans and to agents, which Rujul says is why Anthropic and OpenAI are both customers despite being able to build similar governance tools themselves
Responsibility for a bad agent decision sits with whichever human granted it permission to act, not with the AI itself
Companies that deploy AI deeply across their processes see 39% ROI versus 6% for those that merely pilot it
Zip's negotiation agent helped one customer, UCI Health, avoid over $20 million in costs on a single IT initiative
Rujul predicts the last job AI replaces will be the enterprise seller, since persuading another person and driving an initiative forward isn't something he expects AI to do
1. Orchestrate, then automate
Rujul dropped out of college around 2012 to co-found FlightCar, then worked at Airbnb alongside his future Zip co-founder, Lou, before the two started Zip in August 2020.
Zip's founders set out to understand procurement's full workflow before automating any of it
"Our play when we started Zip was always to orchestrate the work that procurement sort of encapsulates, so that we can understand the work, so that we can... eventually help you do the work." — Rujul Zaparde
That sequencing — observe the whole process first, automate second — shaped what Zip built afterward. The company has since processed roughly $1.2 trillion in cumulative spend approved across its customers, a scale Rujul credits to starting from the full workflow rather than a single task.
