What Is Contract Intelligence?

As contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology gains widespread adoption as a must-have technology for today’s businesses, forward-looking organizations are moving beyond CLM into contract intelligence.

"A contract is a relationship, memorialized." - Monish Darda, CTO and Co-founder of Icertis

Contract intelligence applies AI trained on millions of contracts to transform contract clauses that use natural language to describe an intended outcome of a business relationship into structured data that can be analyzed at scale. It then connects that data with the systems and processes that contracts power.  

Contract intelligence reveals trends, opportunities, and risks about a business that have never been surfaced at enterprise scale before—all of which get acted upon automatically as conditions are met. 

Contract intelligence is more than contract management

Contract intelligence isn’t just a fancy way of saying contract lifecycle management; it’s an evolution of what contract management can do.

Ultimately, every contract has an intended outcome. Contract intelligence makes sure that when contracts get drafted, redlined, and signed, the language in the document reflects that intent. But that’s just the beginning – we also make sure that what’s agreed to in the document gets carried out in the real world.

Contract intelligence has a direct impact on a company’s operations and bottom lines. With contract intelligence, sales contracts become more lucrative, sourcing deals drive savings and supply chain performance, compliance becomes the default and risk becomes visible and manageable.

The proven value of contract intelligence platforms

In contrast to less robust systems, contract intelligence platforms push the boundaries of what’s possible in speed, performance, scalability, and visibility to offer unmatched value for an organization’s initial investment.

Speed:

When it comes to managing complex contract portfolios, speed matters. Contract intelligence solutions streamline and automate every step of the process, allowing organizations to get up and running quickly, take advantage of faster onboarding and RFX administration, and connect seamlessly with existing tools to accelerate organization-wide adoption.

Performance:

Intelligent systems enhance the performance of every agreement, increasing cash flow by ensuring all entitlements are realized, minimizing time and money spent on management and legal fees, empowering sales teams to close deals faster by shortening negotiation cycles and improving every new contract by automatically suggesting optimal terms, and preventing leakage from unwanted renewals or expired agreements.

“Contract intelligence helps companies memorialize the intent of that relationship, correctly. And it makes sure that the intent is realized in real life.” - Monish Darda, CTO and Co-founder of Icertis

Scale:

AI-powered CLM tools are trained on millions of contracts and continue to learn as the organization grows. It protects brands by proactively monitoring contractual obligations, ensuring compliance with all terms and requirements, responding in real-time to regulatory changes anywhere in the world, building up-to-date regulatory language into every contract while flagging exceptions for a proper review, and guaranteeing agreements are honored even as conditions evolve.

Visibility:

Intelligent management tools offer unsurpassed visibility into an ever-changing marketplace, empowering leaders to be agile and make informed decisions at the drop of a hat with on-demand data extraction and powerful new insights to strengthen key relationships and meet changing customer expectations.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning amplify contract intelligence

Artificial intelligence can amplify the power of contract intelligence from start to finish. And machine learning ensures that the whole system grows increasingly smarter and faster as it absorbs new information.

Contract creation:

Artificial intelligence speeds up the contract setup process by modeling your contract relationship and leveraging a library of hundreds of thousands of clauses sourced from millions of existing contracts. By combining insights from your contracts and thousands of similar documents, AI structures new contracts to bring static contracts to life. All the while, machine learning continually improves the platform by integrating new data and optimizing workflows. 

Contract negotiation:

In today’s fast-paced business environment, organizations must create and evaluate large volumes of contracts. Artificial intelligence contract management tools enable users to consistently negotiate the best possible terms and outcomes, reduce the manual contract review process of lengthy contracts, avoid repeating past mistakes, and optimize the process by implementing best practices across their organization.

Obligation management:

When a company enters into a contract, they’re making a set of promises. These promises may take the form of obligations, commitments, SLAs, and entitlements and may go unfulfilled if left to error-prone manual management. Contract automation uses artificial intelligence to discover and elevate obligations hidden in complex contract language, ensure compliance, and strengthen customer and supplier relationships.

Analytics:

Your contracts contain a wealth of valuable data waiting to be uncovered. Powerful contract intelligence AI helps you analyze and gain unprecedented insights from your agreements. Artificial intelligence helps businesses make better decisions by recognizing patterns and identifying hidden relationships in contract data, anticipating potential bottlenecks, and providing transparent reporting for key stakeholders.

For a more in-depth look at how you can leverage AI to manage the entire contract lifecycle, see this article here.

Icertis Contract Intelligence: The only contract intelligence platform companies can trust to keep them out in front, now and into the future

The Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform streamlines processes for every stage of the life of a business’s agreements, making it easy to manage every facet of its contract portfolio, from monitoring the performance of a single contract to performing bulk actions for amendments and regulatory changes. Plus, robust contract workflow processes allow users to search and access all of their contract data on-demand.

The Icertis Contract Intelligence platform makes it easy to analyze and review your contracts at any stage of the contract lifecycle management process. AI-based tools can recognize contract language and attributes and then build algorithms to automatically choose the right approach based on the content of the contract. This can help mitigate risk and uncover potential opportunities.

Ready to learn more about contract intelligence?

With unmatched technology and category-defining innovation, Icertis pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with contract lifecycle management (CLM). The AI-powered, analyst-validated Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform turns contracts from static documents into a strategic advantage by structuring and connecting the mission-critical contract information that defines how an organization runs. Today, industry leaders trust Icertis to fully realize the intent of their combined 10 million+ contracts worth more than $1 trillion, in 40+ languages across 90+ countries.

Want to learn more about what is contract intelligence or are you ready to improve your business in ways you never imagined? Schedule a call with one of our platform specialists or join an upcoming CLM demo to discover how Icertis can help you go beyond contract management to find your new strategic advantage.

Request a Demo