Zycus’s Merlin Intake transforms procurement onboarding with AI-driven request management

Andrew Bartolini of Ardent Partners says enterprise procurement has long had a weak point at the very start of the buying process: the moment a user decides they need something and then works out how to obtain it outside the system. That gap, once treated as a minor usability issue, has grown into a larger discipline now commonly described as intake management.

In a recent briefing with Zycus, Bartolini examined Merlin Intake, the company’s AI-driven request management produc...

t, and why it is attracting attention at a time when procurement teams are trying to pull more spending back under control. The underlying problem is familiar across large organisations. When employees find formal procurement tools cumbersome, they sidestep them through email, chat apps, informal approvals or company cards. Each shortcut weakens visibility, undermines policy, and leaves procurement with less influence over suppliers, terms and compliance.

Zycus argues that intake has become strategically important because older approaches were built for professional buyers rather than occasional requesters. A form-heavy system may suit a procurement specialist, but it is often a poor fit for someone in marketing, operations or technology who simply needs to ask for a service or product once in a while. As conversational AI has improved, vendors have begun to reimagine intake as a dialogue rather than a workflow that starts with a blank screen and a long list of mandatory fields.

Merlin Intake is positioned as part of Zycus’ broader source-to-pay platform rather than as a separate layer. The company says the product sits on the same data foundation as the rest of the suite, allowing a request to move from intake into sourcing, contracting, invoicing and approval without repeated handoffs. Zycus’ argument is that this matters because a pleasant front-end experience is not enough if the request later has to pass through a patchwork of integrations and disconnected systems.

During the demonstration, the system was shown handling a catering request for a marketing event in New York with a budget of $25,000 and an unfamiliar supplier. The user entered the request in plain language, and the software pulled out the relevant details, asked follow-up questions and identified that supplier onboarding would be needed before a purchase order could be created. It also estimated the likely cycle time based on company policy and process norms. At one point, after attendee numbers were entered, the system adjusted the requisition total to reflect a per-head calculation, a small but telling sign that it was doing more than simply capturing text.

Zycus says administrators can define policies in natural language rather than code, with the system interpreting those rules and guiding users toward compliant outcomes. In practice, that means someone asking for an item that requires sourcing or approval may be directed into the right process without having to understand the mechanics behind the scenes. The company also says users can check request status, review outstanding purchase orders or query spend through the same conversational interface that initiated the request.

The product is available through Microsoft Teams and a web portal, which Zycus presents as a way to meet staff where they already work. That approach is echoed in the company’s product materials, which describe Merlin Intake as a single AI agent that can collect and route requests across Teams, Slack and portals, while also supporting multilingual interaction for global teams. Zycus says the system can apply region-specific policy logic, route based on spend thresholds or urgency, and synchronise with local ERP and vendor systems.

A further part of the pitch is the AI stack underneath. Zycus says Merlin Intake uses ChatGPT as its base model, supported by proprietary prompting and retrieval-augmented generation to keep responses anchored in company data and policy documents. The company also acknowledges that early versions suffered from hallucination issues, but says those have been reduced through prompt engineering and architecture changes. That is a familiar challenge across enterprise AI products, where the real test is not whether a model can answer questions, but whether it can do so reliably inside the guardrails of corporate data.

Zycus says it is also moving towards deeper database connectivity for live operational use cases, including identifying purchase orders at risk of late delivery using historical delivery patterns, due dates and supplier performance data. If that capability matures as described, it would push intake software beyond request capture and into decision support.

The company cited two customers during the briefing, though it did not name them publicly. One is said to be using Merlin Intake across 17 procurement workflows, while another has connected travel and expense processes to the same environment. The broader use cases described by Zycus span catalog and non-catalog buying, hardware and software requests, services, renewals, invoice handling, NDAs, supplier terminations, staffing needs and event management.

For procurement teams, the significance of that breadth is clear. The front door is no longer just a starting point; it is becoming the place where policy, routing, supplier choice and process control either begin properly or fail immediately.

Source: Noah Wire Services