Imagine having to pull together a 300-page contract. Now imagine having to manually monitor and manage thousands of those contracts post-signature to capture the full potential of each business relationship. The task is daunting.
Contracts are at the heart of strategic initiatives in every industry yet managing them effectively remains a significant challenge. Overseeing a large portfolio of contracts, each with unique terms, conditions and performance metrics, is an intricate and time-consuming challenge. For critical business functions like procurement, finance and legal, poor contract management can cost companies as much as 9 percent of their bottom line.
But AI-driven contracting is now empowering those teams to move beyond outdated practices and strategically adapt in today’s commercial landscape.
Optimizing business relationships through AI
While most business relationships depend on legally binding agreements, Monish Darda, chief technology officer and co-founder of Icertis, recognizes that contract management is not always perceived as a particularly glamorous practice.
However, he emphasizes that commercial agreements are vitally important in enabling enterprises to achieve increased revenue, reduce costs, ensure compliance and manage risk. Therefore, “it’s extremely important for the business,” he says.
The global leader in AI-powered contract intelligence, Icertis has a rich history of AI innovation and has become an established player in the AI market over its 15-year lifespan. In 2023, Icertis expanded its long-standing strategic partnership with Microsoft by becoming a launch partner for Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and releasing the market’s first GenAI contracting Copilot. This milestone builds on their collaboration since 2018, when Icertis first began delivering solutions using Azure AI.
Built on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, the Icertis Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) and Icertis proprietary AI models to derive insights from a customer’s data that enable powerful, material business outcomes. By integrating contract intelligence with enterprise systems, the Icertis platform actively monitors deliverables against contract terms, unlocking the hidden – and many times lost – commercial value in contracts.
Generative AI’s ability to quickly analyze and summarize key contract provisions in seconds has proven valuable for helping businesses get the most out of their agreements. These capabilities have already delivered substantial bottom line impact. In fact, Icertis estimates that managing 10,000 contracts annually with its AI-driven platform could save businesses millions each year. For example, one Fortune 500 global pharmaceutical company saved $70 million annually by enforcing commercial terms with Icertis for more than 250,000 supplier contracts in 17 languages.
Data and security strategy is the top factor influencing trust in AI technology vendors among customers. “The biggest question I get is around data privacy and security,” says Darda.
As cyberattacks continue to escalate, Icertis has aligned its strategy and principles to Microsoft. Icertis focuses on three pillars of security in safeguarding its customer environments worldwide: infrastructure security, platform security, and data protection and compliance.
Through its partnership with Microsoft to deliver Icertis Copilot, Icertis safeguards its customers’ confidential information and data with technology that enables the security and reliability that large-scale enterprises need to responsibly integrate AI into core business operations.
Looking ahead with AI agents
Over the past two years, generative AI emerged as a groundbreaking innovation and quickly evolved into the next wave of transformative technology. Icertis is now imagining the next stage of AI with agentic workflows that can act as a force multiplier to scale enterprise resources and bring businesses one step closer to autonomous contracting.
By delivering agents designed to enable efficiency and performance across business relationships, Icertis is accelerating measurable value and empowering customers to reimagine their business with autonomous and human-in-the-loop workflows that enhance agility and efficiency, and reducing risk, all while keeping financial health at the forefront.
AI agents work on behalf of an individual or team to operate and orchestrate business activities within predetermined guardrails and controls. They range from agents that handle simple prompts and responses to fully autonomous agents that can coordinate between corporate databases and other agents. For example, Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant enables users to interact with these agents. Similarly, Icertis is on the brink of ushering in a new way of working with AI agents by incorporating agentic workflows into its flexible and secure enterprise-class platform.
Icertis combines the integrations, AI expertise and deep understanding of contracts necessary to deliver an agent-powered system that is foundational to the enterprise. With the deployment of AI agents on the horizon, Icertis is positioning this new wave of enterprise technology as the future of what’s possible in contracting, with Microsoft’s technology playing a pivotal role behind the scenes. In fact, an Icertis-sponsored study found that 90 percent of procurement leaders have considered or are already using AI agents to optimize operations in the year ahead.
Hypothetically, by taking a set of agents that are powered by Azure Open AI, “These agents can actually look at the contract from many different lenses,” says Darda. “One agent looks at obligations. Another agent looks at risk. Another agent looks at compliance.”
Working together, the AI agents can draft analyses and summaries, accompanied by tables and other visuals that present the contract in a very relatable, consumable way. “This is where customers get really excited,” he adds.
Embracing AI at Icertis
The adoption and application of new technologies, particularly AI, can be a challenge that requires a company-wide mindset shift. Icertis was already well ahead of the curve with deep experience using early iterations of AI, says Sudarshan Chitre, senior vice president in charge of products at Icertis.
As a long-time Microsoft and Azure customer, “The [Icertis] team is very comfortable working with new technologies and even pre-release preview software,” says Chitre, recalling the early access to beta versions of Microsoft’s Azure SQL Database. Icertis product team members are early adopters of Microsoft technology, collaborating closely on pre-release versions of new AI innovations and offering initial feedback. “In general, the willingness to adopt technology that is not yet proven is natural for our team,” he adds.
When generative AI first burst onto the scene in early 2023, Icertis developers immediately recognized its potential to streamline contracting and were eager to experiment. Broad excitement over generative AI was “how quickly its value was realized and experienced by everyone. The technology provided an easy way for everyone to interact with it,” says Chitre.
Darda recalls that not everyone inside the company were early AI adopters, however. In fact, Darda, being an advocate for AI, had to draw inspiration from his mom’s experience with ChatGPT to help motivate company-wide adoption of AI applications within the company and his team of developers.
The 85-year-old uses WhatsApp to send messages to her far-flung family members, composing messages in her native Marathi, one of over 1,600 languages and dialects spoken across India – and using AI to translate them into English before posting.
Darda says he shared his mother’s example at an all-hands meeting at Icertis. “I said, ‘Hey, my mom actually changed how she worked. What are you folks doing?’”
The example helped inspire non-programmers to give AI a try in their own daily lives, pushing adoption rates among Icertis employees to near 90 percent. With the rise of internal adoption of AI in their workflows, Icertis engineers have been able to benefit from AI technologies like GitHub Copilot for code generation and analysis, and security assessments to drive innovation and efficiency.
Ultimately, Chitre adds that AI is an integral part of Icertis’ operational framework, significantly enhancing the company’s software development process. Chitre emphasizes that generative AI from Microsoft has been a massive accelerant for contract intelligence – the Icertis platform is built on Azure and integrates with Microsoft 365, and Icertis Copilot is powered by Microsoft GenAI.
As Icertis continues to lead in AI-powered contract intelligence, it exemplifies the tangible business value that transformative AI can offer. Its partnership with Microsoft remains a cornerstone, ensuring that Icertis stays at the forefront of technology innovation for customers worldwide.
Top photo: Icertis co-founders Monish Darda (left) and Samir Bodas (right). (All photos courtesy of Icertis.)