Why AI-enhanced CLM is the key to better contract visibility and control 

Contracts have long been integral to the business landscape, but they’re often perceived as cumbersome and complex, failing to receive the attention they deserve as strategic assets.  

In a recent survey conducted by the International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM), more than 50% of respondents acknowledged that their contracts were not a source of competitive advantage. On average, contracts underperformed against expectations by some 27%.  

For any organization that cares about its business results and market reputation, a data-first approach to Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is key for organizations to unlock actionable insights and transform the way they negotiate, track, and manage agreements.  

Extracting contract data for key insights 

In contract management, it’s helpful to understand what types of data exist within a contract. Extracting the right data from contracts such as terms, obligations, dates, clauses, and everything in between is key.  

It starts with four foundational questions we ask of every contract: 

1. What have you agreed to? This is your contract content data – the key terms, clauses, governing laws, and obligations buried in your documents. 
2. How did the contract come together? This is processing data – who negotiated, what changed and when, how long approvals took, and who signed off.  
3. Is the contract being fulfilled? Performance data monitors contractual obligations comprehensively. Renewals, payments, and deliverables across both parties keep you updated on what’s due or overdue. 
4. What should you do next? Contract data is key to driving strategic decision-making. With decision support data, risk scoring, and performance analysis, you can proactively reduce exposure, renegotiate unfavorable terms, and even forecast future contract spend. 

These four types of contract data form the blueprint for a smarter, efficient, and more strategic data-first CLM strategy. 

Gaining visibility into the contract lifecycle 

When contract data is structured and searchable, it stops being a record of what was and becomes a tool for deciding what should be. With a data-first CLM platform, users can: 

• Ask conversational questions of their contracts, like “Is there an insurance provision?” or “What’s the governing law?” and get answers instantly – backed by document references, a capability of white box AI solutions.  

• Track every change across versions, even if redlines were done offline or track changes were disabled. 

• Manage performance post-signature, from recurring payments to renewal alerts to real-time compliance tracking. 

• Surface risk with AI-enhanced clause analysis, highlighting deviations from standard terms and listing outliers for approval. 

• Drill into dashboards that connect metadata, performance metrics, and contract health to broader business goals. 

All of this is configurable without experience in coding, so teams can adapt to the platform to how they actually work, not the other way around. 

Integrating contract data across the business 

Contracts don’t live in isolation, and neither should contract data. When seeking a data-first CLM solution, ensuring it can seamlessly integrate with systems like DocuSign, Adobe, Slack, ERP platforms, and more, is critical in liberating data for everyone on your team – ultimately bridging the gap between Legal, Procurement, Finance, and Sales. 

Agiloft’s Data-first Agreement Platform is designed to make contract data available to all the systems throughout an organization so it can fully transform how business gets done. That’s why Agiloft can integrate with over 1,000 systems. “If you have a middleware iPaaS solution that you prefer, such as Boomi, for example, then you could use that instead,” Harmony Romano informed. With robust integration capabilities, Agiloft supports seamless connectivity, whether for approvals via Slack or syncing with other ERP systems. 

Leveraging AI capabilities in contract management 

According to Gartner, over 70% of legal leaders will either begin or continue to implement generative AI (GenAI) solutions in their departments within the next two years. The CLM market has been quick to respond to the hype around GenAI, but how can legal leaders effectively use GenAI in CLM? 

Agiloft’s AI capabilities tailor AI-driven workflows to the exact needs of legal and contracting teams, empowering organizations to deploy AI in a way that precisely meets their needs. At the core of Agiloft’s new generative AI features is the unique offering to leverage white box AI, providing complete transparency into the decision-making process and allowing users to understand and trust the AI model’s reasoning behind every outcome.  

With Prompt Lab and Ask AI, legal professionals can ask specific questions about a contract and receive AI-driven responses that are directly tied to the source of the information within the document. With this white box AI functionality, users can confidently trust AI responses by instantly jumping to the highlighted content within the contract that supports the answer. This capability eliminates the guesswork from AI-driven insights, providing legal teams with the precision they need to make informed decisions. 

In addition, Agiloft’s AI Platform is instrumental in facilitating proactive decision-making through risk analysis. When extracting clauses within a contract, the platform’s AI runs a risk analysis on each of them. This feature empowers organizations to assess risks systematically and make strategic adjustments. 

One question we often hear is, “Are our contracts being used to train your AI?” The simple answer is no. Agiloft’s AI models do not use any customer data, from contracts or any other documents, to train themselves or others. Each implementation is secure, siloed, and specific to your environment. Agiloft combines proprietary AI, such as Screens AI for contract review and redlining, with third-party tools like Claude, delivering the right engine for each task without compromising confidentiality or security. 

From visibility to vision 

Agiloft is at the forefront of modernizing contract management by turning contracts into strategic assets filled with actionable insights. When contract data is liberated, it becomes a source of truth, a foundation for decision-making, and a strategic asset. If your contracts aren’t working this hard for you, maybe it’s time they did. 

Watch our recent webinar for a deeper understanding of data-first CLM.