Zycus Horizon Europe 2024: AI-Driven Innovation in Procurement

At Zycus Horizon Europe 2024, Tejit Mithal, AVP for Product Management, Zycus, delivered a hands-on live demo showcasing how Gen AI and agentic AI are reshaping procurement operations. Moving beyond theoretical discussions, the session demonstrated real-world applications of AI-driven autonomous agents in procurement, illustrating how these intelligent systems streamline sourcing, approvals, and policy adherence with minimal human intervention. Tejit began by explaining the core capabilities of autonomous procurement agents—AI-driven programs that operate with self-determined objectives, executing procurement tasks independently through orchestration, data retrieval, and large language models (LLMs). He emphasized how these agents work in parallel and sequence, leveraging an agentic platform to optimize efficiency across the source-to-pay (S2P) process.

 

The live demo focused on:

 

1. Autonomous Negotiation Agent – AI-powered negotiation workflows that achieve optimal supplier bids in under 10 minutes.
2. Merlin Intake Management – A Gen AI-driven system that simplifies procurement requests and decision-making for business users.
3. Policy Interpretation AI – A language graph model that extracts procurement policies from Word documents and PDFs, ensuring compliance.
4. Procurement AI in Action – A Microsoft Teams integration where users submit procurement requests (e.g., purchasing a printer) and receive instant, AI-driven responses, eliminating back-and-forth approvals.

  This demonstration showcased how procurement teams can reduce manual workload, enhance compliance, and improve decision-making by implementing autonomous workflows. The session concluded with a call to action, urging businesses to embrace AI-driven procurement or risk being left behind in an era of automation.