The Agentic Advantage: How AI Agents Will Up-Level Business Contracting

The future of enterprise applications is rapidly evolving, with AI agents poised to take center stage. IDC predicts that by 2030, 50 percent of enterprise applications will pivot to agent-powered interfaces that use text and voice prompts, signifying a major overhaul in the technology that businesses rely on.  

IDC predicts that by 2030, 50% of enterprise applications will pivot to agent-powered interfaces. 

For many leaders, AI agents might seem like just another buzzword, but the reality is that agentic workflows will drive significant productivity. Contracts form the cornerstone of business relationships and provide a rich data source for AI to leverage, making contract management one of the first areas where agentic workflows will manifest value.

What does the future look like for AI agents in contracting? Let’s start with the basics and then examine how agentic workflows will up-level contracting across core business functions.

What’s the Difference Between AI Agents and Copilots?

While copilots and agents both enhance efficiency, they serve fundamentally different roles. Copilots analyze and deliver insights to assist users in decision-making. Agents take it a step further to take action based on those insights. Agents don’t just augment knowledge – they augment execution by solving complex, multi-step problems autonomously to scale resources and act as a force multiplier for productivity.

AI agents don’t just augment knowledge. They augment execution by solving complex, multi-step problems autonomously. 

In the context of contracting, this means AI agents can streamline drafting, negotiation, and post-signature management of contracts, working in tandem under human supervision. The result? Faster cycles, reduced risk, and increased ROI from contractual agreements.

Elevating Contract Value with AI Agents

AI agents will bring a new level of intelligence to contracting across the enterprise. The value that AI has already delivered is only the beginning as businesses look to a future where agents act as partners to their workforce. For finance, legal, and procurement teams, that future might be closer than they think. 

Finance: Reducing Costs and Maximizing Revenue

According to Gartner, automation can save finance departments 25,000 hours of work annually. Today’s AI-powered analytics enable finance teams to identify revenue leakage and potential savings across thousands of contracts. However, these insights still require human intervention to take action. AI agents will be able to automatically initiate cost-cutting motions, such as requesting price reductions from suppliers when contract terms trigger discounts for bulk purchases or inflation adjustments. 

Procurement: Smarter Supplier Negotiations

Procurement teams rely on AI today to optimize contracts across the supply chain, and more than 70 percent of businesses expect to use AI for supplier evaluation and selection in 2025. AI agents take the next step by not only equipping teams with powerful insights, but also proactively supporting supplier negotiations with decision-making. For example, an AI agent could redline a contract to suggest cost reductions based on real-time market data during an active negotiation. 

Legal: Streamlining Contract Review and Risk Management

Legal teams are already benefiting from AI’s ability to flag high-risk contracts and accelerate contract reviews by up to 40 percent, but the review process remains cumbersome and time-intensive for enterprises with hundreds of thousands of contracts. AI agents can take over low-risk contract processing, autonomously routing agreements through various approval stages and consolidating stakeholder feedback into a final draft. This will significantly reduce the workload of legal teams while also ensuring regulatory compliance remains top priority. 

Looking Ahead

The integration of AI agents and agentic workflows into contracting represents a seismic shift in business operations. Icertis is at the forefront of this transformation, building agentic workflows into its enterprise-grade platform to deliver increased value for customers. As we move closer to autonomous contracting and a world where AI is a true business partner in human decision-making, AI agents are an imminent reality and critical drivers in the enterprise journey to intelligent contracting.