Sourcing that starts before the requisition
Describe a business problem in plain language. Merlin Agentic Sourcing (MAS) analyzes your spend, contracts, suppliers, and the market — then recommends the right action, whether that's running an event, renegotiating, or walking away.
Procurement is accountable for value. But by the time you're looped in,
the value is already gone.
What Merlin Agentic Sourcing actually does
Describe a business problem — "reduce our exposure to single-source data centre providers" - and MAS does the work a strategic sourcing manager would do, in minutes instead of weeks.
Analyses everything that matters.
Three years of spend. Every relevant contract. Supplier performance, risk scores, auto-renewals. Community benchmarks. External market data — commodity indexes, geopolitical risk, ESG, inflation forecasts. Plus your own documents, in any format. Non-Zycus data via MCP where available.
Recommends the right action - not just an event.
Renegotiate. Issue a non-renewal. Consolidate. Diversify. Run a hybrid RFP. Or hold and revisit. The recommendation fits the business, not the solution.
Executes end-to-end, with you in control.
Drafts the RFx, scores responses (including supplier attachments), recommends awards, tracks projected vs. achieved savings. You approve at the decision points. The agent handles the rest.
The world changed. Sourcing didn't.
Speed of business outpaces sourcing cycles.
Business problems arrive faster than sourcing cycles can respond. Supplier risk shifts overnight. Inflation reprices categories mid-year. The traditional cycle is no longer fast enough to be relevant.
Procurement teams aren't getting bigger.
Most CPOs handle more categories, more suppliers, more risk — with the same headcount they had three years ago. Something has to absorb the analytical depth that used to require a consulting engagement.
The data exists. The synthesis doesn't.
Every enterprise has spend, contract, and supplier data, plus access to market intelligence. What's missing is the layer that pulls it together fast enough to inform the current decision, not the next one.
Why this couldn't have existed two years ago.
Large language models can now reason across structured and unstructured data, hold context across long workflows, and act within defined guardrails. That wasn't true in 2023.
Zycus has spent years connecting spend, contracts, suppliers, performance, and risk into a single ecosystem. Without that foundation, an agent has nothing reliable to reason over.
ANA — Zycus's Autonomous Negotiation Agent — has been running autonomous negotiation on enterprise tail spend in production. The agentic foundations work. Merlin Agentic Sourcing extends them from negotiation on the tail to the full sourcing workflow on the strategic core.
From business problem to award - in one conversation.
Most sourcing solutions start with a requisition and twenty form fields. Merlin Agentic Sourcing starts with a sentence.
Describe the problem
"Diversify our APAC electronics supply base ahead of Q3." No forms, no templates.
MAS analyzes your world
Internal spend, contracts, suppliers, risk. External signals. Anything you upload.
You see the strategy, not the data
Recommendations ranked by fit to your stated outcome — cost, resilience, innovation, sustainability, speed.
MAS executes the path you choose
If it's an event, Merlin builds the RFx and runs it. If it's a renegotiation, Merlin drafts and tracks next steps.
Projected becomes achieved
Every recommendation tracked from projection to outcome. Value you can defend in the boardroom.
Built for the people who own the strategy.
boardroom setting
Get procurement into the strategy conversation, not just the execution one. Defend value contribution with projected-vs-achieved data, not anecdotes.
desk + laptop
Stop spending most of your time on data prep. Compress hours of spend analysis into minutes. Bring a defensible category strategy to every stakeholder meeting.
mid-workflow
Run more events of higher quality, with the same team. Compress RFP creation from hours to minutes. Compete on insight, not on hours worked.
measured + composed
Procurement value, finally measurable. Every Merlin Agentic Souring recommendation tracked from projection to outcome — auditable, attributable, built into the workflow.
What Merlin Agentic Souring isn't.
A lot of solutions are calling themselves "agentic" right now. Here's how Merlin Agentic Souring is actually different.
You may already know ANA. Here's where Merlin Agentic Sourcing fits.
Autonomous negotiation, run by business users.
ANA — Zycus's Autonomous Negotiation Agent — was built for tail spend. It empowered business users to run autonomous, policy-compliant buying on high-volume, low-risk transactions.
Full sourcing workflow, run by procurement professionals.
Merlin Agentic Sourcing is built for the other end of the spend curve — the strategic categories where stakes are high and the work is owned by sourcing professionals.
Built on years of sourcing data, refined by the agentic era.
Merlin Agentic Souring isn't a new company's first product. It's built on the Zycus Intake-to-Outcomes platform that powers procurement at hundreds of global enterprises — refined by the data and decisions of thousands of sourcing events.
The agent is new. The intelligence underneath it has been compounding for years.
Questions you're probably asking.
Does this replace my sourcing team?
No. Merlin Agentic Souring replaces the work a sourcing team does that doesn't need to be done by a human — the data pulls, the benchmark hunts, the document scraping, the first-draft analysis. It frees your team to do the work that does need a human: stakeholder conversations, supplier relationships, judgment calls. The decision points stay with you.
How is this different from ANA?
ANA is built for tail spend — autonomous negotiation on high-volume, low-risk transactions, run by business users. Merlin Agentic Souring is built for strategic spend — full sourcing workflow on the categories where stakes are highest, run by procurement professionals. Different scope, different users, same agentic foundation. Many customers will use both: ANA on the tail, Merlin Agentic Souring on the strategic core.
How is this different from the AI features other sourcing solutions have added?
Most are AI-assisted, not agentic. They help with discrete tasks — drafting an RFx, summarising a contract. Merlin Agentic Souring runs the full workflow, from problem statement to award, and recommends the path along the way. The difference is task-level help versus workflow-level autonomy.
What about data security and governance?
Merlin Agentic Souring runs on the Merlin Agentic Platform — Zycus's enterprise governance layer — with role-based controls, audit trails on every agent action, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints at every consequential decision. You define the guardrails. The agent operates inside them.
What if my data isn't clean enough?
Merlin Agentic Souring works with the data you have. The Zycus Intake-to-Outcomes platform has been refining enterprise procurement data for years — the cleanup, normalisation, and enrichment is part of the foundation, not something you have to solve before getting value.
What if we don't have all the Zycus modules?
Merlin Agentic Souring works best with the full Zycus Intake-to-Outcomes ecosystem, but it can also pull from non-Zycus data sources via MCP where available — including ERP and other procurement systems. You don't need every module to start.
Is Merlin Agentic Souring available now?
Availability and GA timing details to be confirmed at launch.
See what sourcing looks like when it starts earlier.
A 30-minute demo with one of our solutions architects, walking through Merlin Agentic Souring on a category and a problem you actually care about — not a generic scripted flow.
