Icertis Vera: A Smarter Contract AI for Better Commercial Outcomes

Today, we released Icertis Vera – a smarter AI for contracts. This is an incredibly proud moment for us at Icertis, as it not only represents a major milestone in our mission to empower customers to realize the full intent of their business relationships, but also serves as the culmination of 15+ years of innovation in the CLM space.

With Vera, we are harnessing knowledge gained as the de facto leader in enterprise CLM to tune frontier LLM models for the nuances of contract language and data. Vera enables whatever model our customers are using to surface relevant, contextual, and conversational insights across the contract management lifecycle, reinventing the value they can derive from their business relationships.

The name says it all: Vera is derived from veritas, Latin for truth, and with Vera our customers will gain contract insights they can trust.

Why Vera Is Different

We are doing something no other CLM provider can.

More than fifteen years of managing Global 2000 contract portfolios has provisioned Icertis with one of the largest repositories of contract data in the world.

Of course, data alone doesn’t equate to effective AI. With billions of anonymized contract data points to work with, we then set about creating embeddings that recognize how legal and commercial terms cluster and relate. We also developed a proprietary semantic knowledge graph that enables LLMs to understand how contract language relates to other clauses in the agreement, and how contracts relate to each other.

We created more contract-specific embeddings and mapped more relationships—accounting for nuances of industry, geography, and business objectives—than anyone else in the market, enabling Vera to better understand contractual relationships between customers, suppliers and partners, as well as relationships between contracts and associated documents (e.g. a MSA and child SOW; subcontractor flow-down obligations). This enables Vera to better understand questions and retrieve better answers, because it understands the business context in which the contract is operating.

The Power of Context

The word “context” here is critical. Contract language is often domain-specific, and industry-specific terms and conditions refer back and forth within the document and to surrounding artifacts. LLMs trained on the web’s data can easily misunderstand user queries against contracts, creating confusion and frustration for contracting professionals.

Consider: The statement “Our servers are slow” could mean vastly different things based on where it is said. In a restaurant it means your drinks are empty; at an office it means your downloads are hung up. When AI doesn’t understand the context, it’s liable to order more processors when what you want is another round.

Now let’s look at an actual contracting use case: Consider a vendor working under strict data governance rules set by its customer. The rules are codified in the master service agreement (MSA) set between the two companies. However, specific projects are defined by child statements of work. With a generic LLM, a review of the SOW alone may miss all the requirements that flow down from the MSA because it does not understand contractual relationships.

Vera, on the other hand, knows that SOWs are typically governed by an MSA, knows how to go looking for it, and knows contextually what kind of language it can expect to find. E.g., if this is an IT contract in EMEA, it will specifically look for GDPR language.

As we see, Vera keeps context intact by understanding the nature of relationships between customers, suppliers, and partners and then enriching that understanding with ontology and the rules of business coded in contracts.

Real Applications Today

We anticipate Vera having a tremendous impact on how enterprises deploy AI to autonomously manage contracts.

According to a recent Icertis survey, more than 80% of executives expect agents to negotiate customer or suppliers deals in the coming three years, with more than 50% expecting agents to be at work within the next 12 months.

While humans will always be kept in the loop of autonomous contracting processes, it is nonetheless critical that the AI powering these agents understand the nuances of the contract(s) they are reviewing and acting on, lest they introduce inaccuracies and risk into the process.

Vera not only enables contract agents to complete tasks like contract composition and track contract obligation fulfillment, but work as de facto contract agents for other agent ecosystems – bringing the power of fine-grained contract insights into the systems and processes contracts touch (S2P, Q2C, etc.).

These agents will take business actions based on conditions set in contracts – autonomous commerce that is rooted in compliance.

Throughout this effort – and across all Icertis innovations – the privacy and confidentiality of customer contract data remained a priority. By anonymizing and removing any commercially sensitive information, we have been able to deliver Vera without compromising on governance.

Looking Ahead

With Vera, we take the next step toward contracts becoming active participants in commerce—no longer static records but dynamic engines of insight and action. What begins today as a breakthrough in contract intelligence points to a future where commerce itself is more autonomous, more contextual, and more aligned to the intent of every business relationship.