Forresterʼs SVM Wave names top vendors in the market

Forrester just published The Forrester Wave™: Supplier Value Management Platforms, Q4 2026, its evaluation of the 10 most significant providers in what, in my understanding, most of the market calls source-to-pay.

It’s no surprise that nearly every page of it is about AI. Forrester argues that “Procurement offers fertile ground for enterprise AI agents because it combines rich transactional data, repeatable workflows, and measurable outcomes.” 

I’d highly suggest reading the outcomes section.

Forrester’s advice to buyers is to “focus on platforms that can demonstrate measurable business outcomes in a small number of high-impact use cases before pursuing broader automation.”

That runs against the way source-to-pay has been bought for two decades, where the platform with the most modules usually won the deal. 

Forrester is telling buyers to “assess platforms not only on the breadth of their AI capabilities but also on their ability to turn those capabilities into trusted  sustainable business results. ” Allow me to unpack my takeaways from the report a bit.

What’s new in the 2026 Forrester Wave for supplier value management

In Forrester’s 2026 SVM evaluation, intake management, procurement orchestration and embedded AI are all criteria in which Zip received the highest possible scores. Once you score those, to me, the difference between the legacy platforms and a company like Zip is plain in the scorecard.

Forrester’s broader market research shows the same change. The Supplier Value Management Landscape, Q2 2024 defines supplier value management platforms as a “portfolio of applications”. 

Two years later, the Supplier Value Management Platforms Landscape, Q1 2026, in my opinion, puts procurement orchestration at the center of how Forrester pictures procurement architecture.

How to evaluate agentic AI in source-to-pay platforms

AI is speeding this up. The agents arriving now go past recommendations and take the action themselves, and that move toward more autonomous AI changes what buyers need to evaluate.

Forrester tells buyers to “evaluate whether agents can operate reliably at scale within clear decision-making, governance, and exception-handling boundaries.” 

This is a platform concern. An agent can only act reliably across procurement when the platform underneath it connects intake, approvals, contracts and purchasing under controls the business trusts.

The way I see it, Zip has the platform foundations to do much more with AI than many of the vendors in this report.

Forrester’s evaluation notes that “Zip’s vision reimagines procurement around orchestration, AI agents, and business outcomes rather than discrete workflows.”

Why procurement software adoption drives business outcomes

Zip received the highest possible scores in criteria within the Strategy category, including innovation and adoption, in Forrester’s evaluation.

Adoption is the score I’d first point any procurement leader to because you don’t get business outcomes without it. A platform that employees route around produces no compliance and no savings, however many modules it has. 

Forrester’s report also notes “[Zip’s] excellent scores for innovation and adoption reflect its significant R&D investment, rapid product delivery, and AI-native operating model” 

Zip is taking an AI-native approach to source-to-pay, and that approach runs through orchestration. Zip earned the highest possible score in the risk monitoring and mitigation criterion.

We will add depth and capability as our Superagents expand to cover more governed execution. Many of our other capabilities, including procure-to-pay, contract management and parts of sourcing, are on par with the field.

Where procurement orchestration and source-to-pay go next

To us, this Wave continues a trend we’ve watched for a long time. It started with the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and we’ve seen it since in The Hackett Group’s analysis and IDC’s MarketScape.

The market is reorganizing around orchestration.

In my view, the market has already moved past the convergence story, where source-to-pay and orchestration gradually merge into one category.

What’s forming now is an intelligence layer for procurement, an agentic AI platform that runs across every procurement process. We believe Zip is the furthest along in building it.

In our opinion, future evaluations of SVM and source-to-pay will put more weight on the components that support this platform, and Zip’s placement in this Wave shows where those evaluations are going. 

Orchestration is the first layer of it.

Access The Forrester Wave™: Supplier Value Management Platforms, Q4 2026 to see how all 10 providers scored.

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.

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