Assistant at the ready: How AI can transform your daily contracting work 

With movies like “The Devil Wears Prada” or even the incredible Donna Paulson on TV shows like “Suits,” the entertainment world has conveyed a clear message: a top-notch personal assistant is imperative for those looking to go above and beyond in the workplace.  

While we may wish we were billionaire tech moguls with our own personal Pepper Potts (and a secret superhero identity), the roles and responsibilities – and even the sentience – of those assistants have changed over time. Today, we are all equipped with a version of a personal assistant in our own pockets – and tools like Airtable, Asana, Smartsheet and more can help you create a virtual personal assistant. These days, you don’t have to wait until you’re a CEO in your penthouse to take advantage of all the benefits your own personal assistant might provide.  

What makes a personal assistant so effective? Most often, it’s because they can take the critical, yet time-consuming tasks and responsibilities off your plate – allowing you to focus on the more dynamic elements of your job. With its evolution over time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools today are perfectly positioned to become our individual personal assistants.  

Contract management, for example, is a foundational responsibility for businesses everywhere, and most legal teams are focused on executing agreements as quickly as possible, while minimizing risk. But, if legal teams and contract managers everywhere were able to offload some of their repetitive daily tasks – while maintaining their fast and safe mentality – could they be doing more?  

Let’s take a look at where AI assistant tools, like Agiloft’s AI platform, can revolutionize the contract management process and serve as a true assistant to contracting professionals worldwide.  

How to use AI for administration and operational efficiency  

While assessing risk, managing obligations, and obtaining signatures are some of the core components of the contract lifecycle, there are many steps throughout the process to get to that stage with opportunities to use AI to supplement your overall contract management process.  

Clause libraries, for example, can be transformational for mitigating risk and improving efficiency by implementing standard language for agreements across your organization. While an extremely valuable tool, clause libraries can be labor intensive to create and maintain – a perfect job for your AI assistant. Leverage AI to analyze your contracts and propose standard language, based on your executed agreements, to get you started, significantly reducing the time and effort involved with creating an actionable clause library.  

AI can also help your contracts make their way through the lifecycle. Legal teams and contract managers feasibly don’t have the resources to inspect every single contract that comes across their desk, there are policies and rules of engagement that determine if and when an agreement needs extra time with the legal team, or not. Let AI assess the presence or absence of those requirements, routing contracts quickly and ensuring no one is taking time working with agreements that should already be complete.  

How to use AI for standardization and risk mitigation  

Oftentimes those rules of engagement mentioned are derived from your company policies and standards based on risk. AI tools can analyze your agreements and present a score, based on language that your organization has deemed risky. Again, now AI can use those risk scores to determine where contracts should travel next in their lifecycle. On a larger scale, you can analyze your overall contract repository to know exactly which active contracts you’re keeping that are identified as high risk. Agiloft customer Rush Medical has seen significant process improvements after implementing its GenAI Prompt Lab to escalate agreements to Legal or push them through their procurement workflow.  

Contracts, as aforementioned, are foundational documents for your business – so it’s not just legal and contracting teams that are concerned with their status, obligations, or other contract details. While Finance might be focused on payment terms and overall spend metrics, Sales might be focused on renewal dates and quantity discounts. Now, you can use AI to create audience-specific summaries of your documents. Ensure that teams are able to find exactly what’s important to them, without searching and with details displayed the same way every time, introducing a standardized way to elevate and share data amongst teams.  

How to use AI for drafting & negotiation 

AI assistants in the drafting and negotiation phase of your contract lifecycle can act as a front-line set of eyes, analyzing contracts and comparing them to either the standards in your clause library, or the playbooks and rules of engagement that you’ve created for different agreements. Now, a first-pass negotiation can occur with thoughtful, surgical redlines inserted to documents that more align with your preferred language.  

Screens by Agiloft uses a data-driven approach to contract negotiation where your agreements either “pass” or “fail” an initial review, based on your playbook. Once that status has been assigned, users can redline areas that failed against that playbook, inserting redlines that move language into the “pass” range.  

How to use AI to free your contract data  

What’s another thing that personal assistants do great for the people they work for? Being the first line of defense when someone needs time with that resource. While Peggy Olson might’ve spent a lot of time answering Don Draper’s phone, many teams don’t have the resources to give every legal and contracting resource a personal assistant – but can your CLM? Agiloft’s “Ask AI” feature allows any user to ask questions about their contracts, acting like a full-time contracting support chatbot for teams outside of Legal. Even better, Agiloft’s Ask AI functionality provides a full description of how the answer was derived, and from where in the contract.  

AI use will continue to grow exponentially as time passes, don’t miss your opportunity to take advantage of those tools, ready to conquer the next great contracting challenge – with your AI assistant by your side.  

Want to see Agiloft’s AI assistant in action? Click here to view our webinar with CCBJ and learn more about leveraging AI as your daily assistant.