Zycus is among the expert organisations at CPO Outlook 2026, 14–15 October at Hotel Birger Jarl in Stockholm, hosting a roundtable across both discussion sessions on Day 1. They arrive from a year in which they put a considerable amount of research into the market.
So, the observation before the welcome: the question in the room has moved. It is no longer what the technology can do. It is who is accountable for what it does, and whether the process underneath it is solid enough for the answer to hold.
What Zycus has put on the record this year
- Released a commissioned Forrester report, Don’t Delegate AI, which makes the case that procurement’s AI agenda should be owned at CPO level rather than handed to IT or to vendors. Summit hub
- Released The Hackett Group’s Agentic AI in Procurement Adoption Index 2026, built on more than 250 global CPO interviews. Presenting it, Chris Sawchuk put the share of CPOs who feel confident in their ability to monitor and control agentic AI at under half. Release
- Describes its own platform as an AI-guided intake layer and an agentic execution layer running on an end-to-end source-to-pay core built organically over two decades — the agents include Merlin Intake, the Autonomous Negotiation Agent and Merlin Analytics. Platform
In the summit press release, founder and chief executive Aatish Dedhia set out the principle Zycus is working to: that AI rewards organisations which design autonomy with intent, where humans define the boundaries and machines act with purpose inside them.
The Intake-to-Outcomes framing carries the same idea across the whole chain: how work enters procurement in the first place, how execution is then orchestrated with AI, and how outcomes are measured at the end — with governance and control running through all three rather than bolted on at the point of automation.
So what — for you, on a Monday morning
Accountability sounds abstract until it decomposes into signatures. Who approves what an agent may do without a human in the loop, and up to what value? Where does the trail live when somebody asks, six months later, why that supplier was selected? Who answers the auditor? These are answerable questions, and answering them is a different exercise from selecting a platform.
The other half is less discussed and probably more decisive. Autonomy inherits whatever it runs on. Intake that routes to the wrong owner, catalogue and contract data that is out of date, approval logic that reflects a structure the business abandoned two reorganisations ago — none of that improves when something faster starts acting on it. It gets applied more consistently, which is not the same thing. That work was worth doing long before anyone said the word agent, and it is the reason two organisations can buy the same capability and get entirely different outcomes.
Which is also why the useful version of this conversation is not whether to use any of it. It is which steps in a process are genuinely better handled without a person, and which only look that way until something goes wrong. That is a question practitioners can only answer for each other, with the detail of their own processes on the table.
This is not a new conversation for EBG. Zycus hosted a roundtable at CPO Outlook 2025 on agentic AI-driven procurement and intelligent automation. A year on, the question in the room has moved from whether it works to who signs for it — which is close to the whole of this year’s theme, From Strategy to Practice: Making Procurement Transformation Real, and precisely what the Day 2 working session on AI is built to handle.
Meet Zycus at CPO Outlook 2026
14–15 October, Hotel Birger Jarl, Stockholm. Zycus host a roundtable on Day 1, running twice — same topic, a new group each time. Come ready to disagree, productively. Register at cpooutlook.com
About Zycus
Zycus is the pioneer of Agentic AI in procurement, redefining the category from Source-to-Pay (S2P) to Intake-to-Outcomes (I2O). Our unified platform uniquely combines native, AI-guided Intake, an Agentic AI execution layer, and a deep, organically built end-to-end S2P core – engineered to deliver measurable business outcomes, not just transactions. At the heart of the platform is the Merlin Agentic AI Platform, with autonomous, goal-driven agents like Merlin Intake, the Autonomous Negotiation Agent (ANA), and Merlin Analytics – guiding every request, unlocking tail-spend savings, and orchestrating execution across the procurement lifecycle.
About CPO Outlook 2026
CPO Outlook is EBG | Network’s Nordic summit for procurement leaders, run since 2010 on a straightforward premise: ask senior practitioners what they most need to discuss, then build the days around the answers. The format is peer and expert exchange — roundtable discussions, peer labs, working sessions and keynotes — rather than a stage and an audience, and the peer sessions are practitioner-led throughout.
The 2026 theme is From Strategy to Practice: Making Procurement Transformation Real. The summit runs 14–15 October at Hotel Birger Jarl in Stockholm, with Day 1 closing on the first Nordic CPO of the Year Award and Day 2 built around a working session on AI in procurement.
Read the full programme at cpooutlook.com/programme-2026 — or register to attend.