Zip and Hackett partner on procurement AI governance

In the past eighteen months, Zip has worked with The Hackett Group on dozens of implementations, making Hackett one of the most experienced delivery partners in our ecosystem. We’re pleased to share that we’re now expanding this partnership into a joint practice focused on governance for AI in procurement

The operating model comes before the platform

Hackett has spent more than thirty years benchmarking SG&A functions, tracking about 50,000 metrics across finance, HR, IT, and procurement. Their work informs what world-class performance looks like in a given sector, with the consulting teams building the roadmap to get there.

This is why their implementations tend to start with the operating model rather than the configuration.

Hackett’s teams redesign approval structures, redefine procurement business partner roles, and rebuild reporting around unified request data before anyone even touches the platform. Clients consolidating intake, purchasing, and invoice processing run one implementation where they’d previously scoped three.

“The projects that go well are the ones where we settle the operating model before anyone configures anything. Zip holds those decisions once we’ve made them, which is why we keep bringing it to clients,” said Nick Xiao, Principal, The Hackett Group

What we’re building next

The disciplines that make a source-to-pay transformation work are the same ones enterprise AI needs to run safely at scale: decision rights, controls, data ownership, role definitions, and escalation paths. Hackett has been installing those for thirty years, while today AI agent governance applies them to software that acts on its own.

That's the next phase of the partnership. Zip's AI Superagents act on live procurement data inside the platform, and Hackett is building the governance model around them. We’re working together to define the decisions an agent is trusted to without human review, the escalation thresholds that route a decision to a human-in-the-loop, the controls that keep an audit trail defensible to internal and external audit, and who is accountable when what an agent decides is wrong.

Most procurement teams today are running AI pilots with governance yet undefined. Together, Zip and The Hackett Group are working to solve this.

Earlier this year, The Hackett Group and Spend Matters named Zip in four Top Tech categories in the Spring 2026 SolutionMap, for intake and orchestration, procure-to-pay, e-procurement, and AP automation.

If you're evaluating procurement platforms this year, contact Hackett's team to walk through what a Zip deployment looks like in the first 90 days, including the operating model decisions that build the foundation for your transformation.