The Legacy Origin Story

Zip is one of the most visible companies in modern procurement software, built around intake and orchestration as an alternative to the category’s traditional legacy platforms. In September, thousands of procurement and finance leaders came to New York for Zip Forward, its annual conference.
We could have tried to invent a new category for Pivot. Instead, we decided to recategorize the companies already in one.
AI has moved the market quickly. Platforms that were considered modern only a few years ago are now adding agents, superagents, governance layers, new SKUs and new fees to foundations created before the AI era.
That gave us a different definition of legacy. Not old software. Software the market has moved past.
We turned that idea into The Legacy Origin Story, an original comic about how the modern disruptor eventually becomes the incumbent it set out to replace.
Then we took the story to the conference.
A digital billboard truck circulated around Manhattan and outside the event with lines including “AI slop on top?”, “Agents need superagents?” and “AI fees everywhere?” Each ended the same way: “That’s legacy software.”
A street team handed out physical copies of the comic to attendees outside the venue, giving them the full origin story behind the billboards they’d been seeing all day.
We never named Zip in the creative. We didn’t need to. The campaign was about changing the frame around the category itself and making the case that software doesn’t need to be old to become legacy.
Pivot had one important advantage in making that argument: we were founded after the AI boom had already changed the expectations for modern software. We didn’t have to retrofit AI onto an older foundation or work backward from a pre-AI architecture.
That’s the difference we wanted the campaign to land on.