Are your contracts scattered across various hard drives, desktops, and cloud locations? Have you ever missed a contract milestone or deadline that forced you into a costly and unnecessary renewal? Are you wasting valuable company time and resources creating manual processes to manage your contracts? If any of these sound familiar, it may be time to consider implementing contract management software.

Whether it’s the personalized list of movies recommended to you by Netflix or customer service chatbots that get you the answers you need day or night, AI has already had a transformative effect on everyday life and will continue to expand as technology evolves. Within the business world – including within contract management-related functions – we’re seeing growing benefits.

But how has AI – or artificial intelligence – already changed some of the key tasks associated with managing corporate agreements? And what realistic expectations should we have for AI’s ongoing impact on how contracts are managed? Keep reading to find out.

Breach of contract: it’s a risk faced by anyone who enters a legal agreement. If you deal with volumes of agreements (and volumes of types of agreements, from employment contracts to vendor and customer deals), chances are good that eventually you will run into a contract that doesn’t deliver on the terms agreed to by all parties.

Across functions and industries, executives are excited about the potential of artificial intelligence – or AI – to transform key business functions. According to a report from Deloitte about the state of AI in the enterprise, businesses believe that the improvements AI can deliver are an important way to help them compete in today’s fast-moving marketplace, with software representing one of the easiest paths to AI adoption.

Among the top benefits, executives say AI is helping them to optimize internal processes and make better decisions. And while these findings are not focused strictly within the contract management function, the opportunities artificial intelligence technologies provide to help businesses manage their portfolios of vendor and supplier agreements, employment contracts, and other key documents are equally great.

But in order to develop an artificial intelligence strategy for contract management that delivers on expectations, it’s important to understand both the capabilities and potential of AI as they pertain to the discipline of contract management. Before you get started, here are five key things you need to know.

At ContractWorks, our team represents the spirit of our company: innovative, agile, and committed to fulfilling the needs of our customers. Our employees come from a variety of experiences and backgrounds, each with a unique set of skills and talents that align with our overall mission of providing simple, smart document management solutions.

We’re proud of the team we’ve assembled, and we think it’s about time you get to know the people behind ContractWorks.

This month we’re catching up with a member of the founding team at SecureDocs, Inc. and Chief Architect, Comron Sattari.

All that research, all those training seminars, all those phone calls with sales representatives and on-boarding experts It’s no secret choosing the right contract management software for your organization is a long and arduous process. And yet, after all that effort, many organizations falter during the last critical step: implementation.

So how do you avoid the typical setbacks and obstacles that can delay (or even terminate) adoption of your contract management software? It takes knowledge and a straightforward, clearly defined on-boarding strategy.

Anyone who uses corporate contracts will tell you that managing such agreements is really about managing risks. With that, the majority of corporate revenues are typically tied into agreements with customers and vendors, the effective mitigation of contract risk plays a major role in a company’s ability to realize the full value of hard-won business agreements. Proactive contract risk management also enables businesses to limit costs, penalties, and other fallout when things don’t go as planned.

But risk landscapes are constantly changing – for better and for worse. While some innovations can help businesses identify and contain potential threats faster and more effectively, other forces, such as shifting regulations require greater diligence than ever before.

Here are four key trends that are currently driving the state of contract risk management.

Contract cycle times are directly tied to business results: whether it’s finalizing the paperwork to bring on a new hire, reaching a deal to obtain key parts and supplies, or closing a sales deal with a new customer - lags in the contract approval process can delay results and profits, and thus directly impact your business bottom line. As business speed and agility increasingly become competitive differentiators, the ability to efficiently process contracts and move on to the execution phase has become a make-or-break imperative.

After months of hard work, conceptualizing, designing, and testing, we’re excited to announce our new artificial intelligence feature - AI Auto-Tagging! Upload your documents and let ContractWorks do the tagging for you. Enjoy more control and productivity with a tagged contract repository ready for searching and reporting.

Read on to learn how AI Auto-Tagging can make managing your contracts easier.

Contracts are one of the most important tools in your company’s possession for driving business results. Whether you’re talking about employee agreements, vendor and supplier contracts, or deals with customers, contracts provide a legally-enforceable framework. A framework for navigating your most important business relationships detailing everything from specifics about deliverables to important terms, conditions and backup clauses should anything go wrong.

But just because all parties sign on and are required to adhere to the terms of an agreement doesn’t mean that contracts magically deliver simply by virtue of their existence alone.  Contracts require careful, detail-oriented handling throughout their lifecycle to ensure that all parties reap the intended benefits and minimize their risks. This practice is known as contract management and having (and sticking to) an effective contract management plan provides key benefits, from a reduced risk of compliance infractions to more favorable outcomes for future contract negotiations.