Deeper Business Insights, Less Effort: The Power of Advanced Contract Analytics

Contracts contain critical information on what a business buys, what it sells, and how it runs. Analyzing contract data can provide companies with high-value insights that enable them to optimize business performance, improve compliance, and increase the speed of business.

Yet for many companies, these valuable insights remain untapped. Why? Because contract data, by its nature, is not structured and therefore has been historically difficult to analyze at scale.

Artificial intelligence, however, is changing this. Advanced, AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM) software enables companies to digitize, structure, and connect contracts so organizations can quickly and efficiently analyze them for potential risk and performance– both before and after an agreement is executed. Through powerful analytics tools, legal departments can negotiate better contracts, and the business can ensure that the intent of every contract is fully realized.

Per our understanding, a recent report from Gartner Research, "Innovation Insight for Advanced Contract Analytics,"* explores both the business impact of slow, manual contract review and the promise that AI delivers. Among the report's insights:

• "Analyzing contract clauses and assessing risk can be a lengthy manual process for organizations managing very high volumes of in-house and third-party contracts, or contracts inherited through mergers and acquisitions."
• "The increasing complexity and volume of contract management requirements can result in increased corporate risk."
• "By 2024, the current amount of manual effort for contract review will be reduced by 50% due to adoption of AI-based contract analytics solutions."

For companies investing in contract management technology, Gartner offers several recommendations. Among them:

• "Build a competitive advantage in contract risk management by deploying a contract analytics solution to identify risky clauses and improve compliance."
• "Assess existing CLM solutions by reviewing the business intelligence and analytics capabilities to meet contract visibility and assessment requirements."

At Icertis, we believe our contract intelligence platform delivers the most advanced contract analytics capabilities on the market.

The Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform leverages AI trained on millions of contracts stored in the platform to identify, structure, and catalog clauses and specific terms by type—e.g., obligations, discounts, penalties—and surface those that could represent opportunities or risk to the organization. This provides legal and other contract managers both the time and insights they need to make strategic decisions that move the needle for the business.

ICI can perform these tasks at scale. Companies using ICI have imported tens of thousands and even millions of contracts onto the platform in a matter of weeks, with the contract data contained within structured for ongoing monitoring and analysis.

ICI also connects into other enterprise systems that contracts touch, so that this contract data can be analyzed in the context of business processes. This enables companies to expand their understanding of how contracts drive all aspects of their business.

Properly managed, contracts can offer strategic advantage to a company so they can stay out in front and be ready for growth.

To access the full Gartner report, visit our landing page here.

*Gartner, Innovation Insight for Advanced Contract Analytics, Kaitlynn Sommers, Patrick Connaughton, 25 January 2019