Zycus has wrapped up its Agentic AI Procurement Summit 2026, a virtual gathering that brought together more than 1,500 senior procurement leaders from over 50 countries to examine how autonomous AI should be governed, scaled and embedded in enterprise buying. The event, held on 13 May, placed the chief procurement officer at the centre of the discussion, reflecting a broader industry shift away from treating AI as a purely technical deployment and towards seeing it as a strategic oper...
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The summit arrived amid growing interest in agentic AI across procurement, following a series of industry forums this year, including Zycus’s Horizon EU & UK conference in Vienna in March, which also focused on the move from process execution to outcome delivery. That backdrop underlined the pace at which procurement teams are being pushed to decide not only what AI can do, but who should control it.
Two new research reports were unveiled during the summit. Forrester’s “Don’t Delegate AI” argues that procurement AI strategy should remain with the CPO rather than being handed to IT teams or software suppliers, with the procurement leader responsible for direction, governance and outcomes. The Hackett Group’s “Agentic AI in Procurement Adoption Index 2026”, based on responses from more than 250 global CPOs, maps where organisations stand on adoption and highlights the distance between pilot projects and enterprise-wide use.
According to the research presented at the event, 58% of procurement leaders expect agentic AI to have a material impact within the next 12 months, yet much of the activity remains at experimentation stage. That tension between interest and execution ran through the day’s sessions, which repeatedly returned to questions of ownership, risk and readiness.
In his opening keynote, Zycus founder and chief executive Aatish Dedhia framed agentic AI as a shift in how procurement is organised and trusted rather than a simple upgrade to existing automation. “AI will not reward organisations that automate blindly. It will reward those that design autonomy with intent , where humans define the boundaries and machines act with purpose,” he said.
The Hackett Group used its analyst session to stress how early the market still is. Chris Sawchuk, principal and global procurement advisory leader at the firm, said: “Less than 50% of CPOs feel confident in their ability to monitor and control Agentic AI technology.”
Live demonstrations of Zycus’s Merlin Agentic AI Platform showed how the company is positioning its tools across the procurement workflow. These included the Autonomous Negotiation Agent, which can run supplier negotiations with limited human involvement; Merlin Intake, which orchestrates intake-to-pay activity; and Merlin Analytics, designed to provide spend visibility at scale.
The summit also featured contributions from Forrester, The Hackett Group, EY and IBM, alongside practitioner discussions on how organisations can move from pilots to production. Attendees gave the event an average rating of 4.5 out of 5, with feedback pointing to the practical nature of the sessions and the usefulness of the demonstrations. One procurement leader, Basil Peetz of Assore Ltd, said: “There are multiple AI solutions being brought to market and are also quickly evolving. The challenge is to make sure the correct partner is selected for this AI journey.”
Zycus said recordings of the summit, together with the research reports, are available on demand. For the company, the event served as both a showcase and a signal: procurement’s next phase may be defined less by whether AI is adopted, and more by who is prepared to own it.
Source: Noah Wire Services
