AI Is Everywhere and Nowhere, Including in Your CLM

This week’s blog is a guest post written by our own Chief Product Officer, Andy Wishart.

I’ve always aspired to have a green thumb, yet I have often needed a little help to keep my plants alive. While some of my family’s hardier plants, like our monstera and pothos, have thrived with occasional watering and sunlight, others have needed more care.  

Just recently, I discovered some black spots spreading across the leaves of the rose bush in our garden. How did I react? I opened my phone, hovered the PictureThis app over the rose bush, and snapped a photo. Within seconds I had at my fingertips a guide on how to get rid of the unwanted fungus.  

Throughout this rose bush saga, the fact that I relied on AI-technology didn’t cross my mind. Similarly, it didn’t cross my mind when I Shazamed a song playing over the radio while out for dinner the other day, or when I checked my Nest Cam alert notifying me that my son was home from school.  

In all three instances – with PictureThis, Shazam, and Nest Cam – I turned to AI-powered technology to make my life easier. The AI, however, remained hidden, serving as a means to an end. The AI provided a simple user experience, in turn allowing me to focus on my desired outcomes: nursing my roses back to health, finding the name of a catchy song, and keeping my family’s home safe from intruders.  

With the introduction of ConvoAI, Agiloft delivers the same benefits of simplified AI experiences to the world of contracts.  

Part of my role as a Chief Product Officer at Agiloft is to empower my team to find new ways to flex, extend, and integrate our CLM platform so we can continually expand the value it delivers to our users and their organizations. By integrating our Agiloft AI Platform with AI pioneer Cognizer’s Genius™ Platform, we’ve together generated ConvoAI, which provides a new and convenient way for both frequent and infrequent CLM users to unlock information in unstructured contracts. 

ConvoAI gives all Agiloft users access to an intuitive interface to find the contracts and contract details they need. Rather than spending time struggling to find the right combination of keywords and filters, users can instead have a conversation with their contracts.  

Just like with the apps described before, little thought needs to be given to the AI technology underlying the search tool: users can simply ask questions to get to the things they want in the way they’re thinking about them.  

By using ConvoAI, users can avoid the pain of manually skimming through contracts or combing through irrelevant search results returned via keyword search.  

Let’s walk through a scenario to better understand ConvoAI. Suppose you’re a Procurement Manager and you’re alerted to the fact that a critical piece of manufacturing equipment just broke down. You need to determine the duration of your warranty and the process for providing notice to the equipment vendor so you can move quickly toward a resolution.  

A search with the vendor name and keyword “warranty” might turn up a long list of results to parse through, but a conversation via ConvoAI will winnow down the results to the ones you need.  

After querying for the active agreement with your vendor, just ask a series of follow-up questions about the contract of interest, such as:  

• What is the warranty provision in the agreement with [Vendor]?  
• What is the effective date of the agreement with [Vendor]?” 
• What is the notice provision in the agreement with [Vendor]? 

By using ConvoAI as opposed to your traditional search tools, you can not only find a specific contract quickly, but you can also dig into the contents of that agreement in a conversational manner, asking additional questions to identify all the information relevant to the issue at hand. Plus, you can verify the results quickly, as the user-friendly search interface provides easy access to the associated contract and its content.  

The purpose of introducing AI to today’s tools, including ConvoAI, is not to impress users with the nuance of the technology, but rather to have the AI operate so seamlessly that you forget this complexity underlies the simplicity of your experience.  

As our teams at Agiloft and Cognizer continue to expand the capabilities of ConvoAI, we look forward to advancing AI across the Agiloft platform. As seamless is it was for me to rely on an AI-powered application to cure the ailments of my rose bush, our vision at Agiloft is that it will be just as seamless for you to apply AI to operate intelligent, autonomous, and optimized contracting processes.