A powerful contract AI tool can do what would take a team of associates a week in seconds. It can assess contracts for risk and structure new agreements intelligently, among other things.
It can also sift through contract clauses, sections, and obligations to ensure compliance with regulations that change periodically. It digitizes contract metadata and makes granular contractual data easily accessible.
Machine Learning
Manual tasks like redlining, approvals, and reviewing contracts become automated using document AI. This frees up time for legal team members to focus on high-touch activities, improving department morale and saving costs.
AI-enabled contract management tools use advanced machine learning to analyze large volumes of agreements, automatically identifying important information and categorizing documents into groups for easy searching. This process takes seconds, and the results are far more efficient than manually doing it by hand.
AI tools also help keep terminology consistent across a firm’s contracts, for example, by ensuring that “confidential information” is defined the same way in all templates and NDAs from business partners. This helps avoid miscommunication and potential regulatory pitfalls. Contract AI can also compare different contract versions, making it easier to identify changes that may have occurred during the negotiation process. This improves efficiency and boosts negotiation accuracy. This is particularly useful when managing large-volume contracts.
Automation
Manual tasks like locating contract information and data, redlining ambiguous language, finding new suppliers, or checking compliance/regulatory obligations can be time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. AI contracting solutions automate these processes, giving teams time to focus on the bigger picture and improve business outcomes.
Advanced CLM and contract AI tools can identify contract obligations and compliance/regulatory aspects, thereby identifying risk before it becomes an issue. This enables your team to take preventative action and mitigate risk before it impacts your organization. As a result, your team will be more productive and can focus on higher-value activities that help your company be competitive and profitable. This translates into improved job satisfaction and morale and helps your business be successful.
Adaptability
Adaptive AI enables systems to automatically adjust to changing environments and minimize the resources needed for ongoing maintenance. It allows businesses to achieve more accurate predictions, detect patterns and anomalies, identify opportunities, and make better decisions.
Moreover, AI-based contract management solutions allow businesses to focus their time and energy on more strategic, needle-moving projects and free up valuable legal talent. It can track thousands of contracts, parse them for important technicalities, and bookmark crucial clauses and dates, eliminating errors and saving costs.
Furthermore, contract AI can help manage unexpected events, such as COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, by analyzing existing contracts for possible force majeure exceptions and reorienting them accordingly. This is made possible by Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subset of AI, which extracts unstructured text from commercial agreements and organizes it into contracts that are easier to analyze and manage. Doing so also helps avoid compliance risks and reduce the risk of lost revenue opportunities.
Security
Contract intelligence software can identify and analyze unstructured data from contracts to find trends, issues, and opportunities for savings. This greatly benefits businesses by allowing teams to focus on other high-value projects.
In addition, AI can help businesses ensure that they’re not falling into regulatory pitfalls and are meeting compliance obligations. It does this by performing a variety of tasks, such as identifying terms that are risky or inconsistent with current regulations, notifying specific teams when a contract is due for renewal, flagging ambiguous language for legal review, and automatically comparing contracts against your company’s pre-approved clause library to find out if you’re overpaying.
This is the part where AI technology comes into its own. It uses rules and machine learning to understand information and make decisions in a way that makes sense to humans, which is crucial for contract management.