Use Cases

The world runs on contracts. In many ways, they are the operating system of a business, governing its external relationships, obligations to employees, financing, insurance, and more. While critical, contracts tend to come in the form of dense, unstructured text. It’s often slow and painful to enter into new contracts, and the valuable information inside of them can be hard to access at scale.

This is where Contracts AI comes in. By giving easier access to the details of agreements, Contracts AI can help improve many systems that use contracts. These range from systems that are obviously contract-centric (e.g., contract management, contract negotiation), to contract-adjacent tools, to day to day business operations software that happens to have a bunch of contract-dependent needs (e.g., CRM, ERP, HRIS, audit), to industry-specific use cases (e.g., in finance or insurance).

Let’s take a deeper look at where Contracts AI can be useful.

Contracts AI in the Core Contracts Ecosystem

Contract Analysis Software
Contracts analysis software helps accelerate these project-based contract reviews, and can make it more accurate and comprehensive too.
Contract Management
Contract management (sometimes known as contract administration) is the process whereby contracts get: created, negotiated, approved, executed, amended (if necessary), and—post-execution—renewed or terminated, their obligations tracked, and intelligence from them gleaned.
Contract Negotiation
Contract negotiation, a regular practice for law firms and in-house teams, typically introduces two kinds of challenges, and pain.

Contracts AI in Contract-Review-Adjacent Systems

Contract management, contract negotiation, and contract analysis are central to contract workflows. Virtual data rooms and eDiscovery systems also tend to be closely adjacent, and we will cover them here.

eDiscovery
Sometimes, eDiscovery projects have a contract angle to them. For example, determining which of a company’s contracts have a problematic term in them, or which might have antitrust implications.
Virtual Data Rooms (VDRs)
Since the documents bidders review in M&A due diligence tend to live in Virtual Data Rooms(VDRs), it makes sense for VDR providers to incorporate Contracts AI directly into the VDR.

Contracts AI in Day-to-Day Business Information Systems

As enterprises increasingly realize that contracts contain really important data, we expect contract data to become regularly integrated in regular business management systems. Let’s cover some in this next section.

Audit
Auditors typically review a sample of their client's contracts, to determine whether the company being audited has appropriately described its business. For example, auditors will review contracts to determine if a company actually has the customer commitments it says it has, see if it has appropriately recognized revenue, and whether it has disclosed embedded leases.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Most companies manage their customers and revenue with the support of some form of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
Document Management Systems
A document management system enables teams to file, organize, and access documents (and, today, even items like emails) for a particular client, customer, project, matter, or file.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems give finance, management, operations, and other teams a window into what is happening in their business.
Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS)
A Human Resources Information System (HRIS) helps companies understand details of their employee relationships, and convey HR-relevant information to employees.
Lease Management
Companies use lease management systems to track details of their leases in the real estate ecosystem.

Contracts AI in Industry Specific Use Cases

Some businesses have extra-special industry-specific opportunities when it comes to getting at the data trapped in contracts. Contracts AI can give easier access to contract data, meaning that businesses can get serious benefits from using it.

Commercial Loans
By automatically finding data in these agreements, Contracts AI can give holders of lots of commercial loans a chance of building a database of what they’ve agreed to.
Financial Trading
Contracts AI can give holders of lots of commercial loans a chance of building a database of what they’ve agreed to.
Insurance
Contracts are super important in insurance. In fact, insurance companies can somewhat be thought of as a brand, people, risk models, and a whole bunch of contracts.