Credit: VentureBeat made with Midjourney

Zip, the $2.2 billion procurement platform startup, unveiled a suite of 50 specialized artificial intelligence agents on Tuesday designed to automate the tedious manual work that plagues enterprise purchasing departments worldwide. This marks what industry analysts call the most significant advancement in procurement technology in decades.

The AI agents, announced at Zip’s inaugural AI Summit in New York, can autonomously handle complex tasks ranging from contract reviews and tariff assessments to regulatory compliance checks — work that currently consumes millions of hours across corporate America. Early adopters, including OpenAI, Canva and Webflow are already testing the technology, which Zip says represents a fundamental shift from AI-assisted workflows to fully autonomous task completion.

“Today Zip is cutting through the agentic AI hype with AI agents that actually work,” said Rujul Zaparde, Zip’s co-founder and CEO, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “Not vague chatbots. Not generic assistants. Real, specialized AI agents that do one job and do it perfectly.”

The announcement comes as enterprises increasingly struggle with procurement bottlenecks that can involve 30 or more approval steps for maj...