Implementing Agentic AI in Contact Management

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence is transforming Contract Lifecycle Management from a complex, manual process into a more strategic and data driven function. While earlier AI tools struggled with legal complexity, advancements in generative and Agentic AI are now enabling more efficient contract drafting, analysis, and workflow automation.

Agentic AI enhances CLM by proactively managing tasks such as drafting, redlining, and approvals, while GenAI helps extract actionable insights from large volumes of contract data. Together, these technologies improve efficiency, compliance, and decision making, while reducing value leakage and enhancing supplier performance.

However, limitations in underlying models especially with complex contracts mean that full automation carries risks. As a result, human oversight remains critical to ensure accuracy, strategic alignment, and regulatory compliance. Ultimately, the most effective approach is a balanced, hybrid model that combines AI driven efficiency with human expertise and strong governance.

Role of Agentic AI in CLM

Agentic AI is an advanced form of autonomous technology that can independently handle contract tasks by planning, reasoning, and executing with little human input. In Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), it goes beyond simple automation to manage workflows, make informed decisions, and work collaboratively with stakeholders throughout the contract process.

More generally, AI brings a sophisticated and disciplined approach to contract management. It often fills gaps as an unintended contract manager or enhances the capabilities of legal and procurement teams. By integrating intelligence into contract processes, Agentic AI helps organizations improve efficiency while gaining valuable insights at the portfolio level.

However, unlocking these benefits requires choosing the right AI tools and establishing clear processes. Success depends on balancing attention between individual contracts and the overall portfolio. A major hurdle is ensuring senior leadership understands and supports the investment in AI driven contract governance and controls.

Stage 1 - Create

In the initial stages, Agentic AI streamlines drafting by understanding business context and automating the generation of legally sound documents.

• Contract Initiation & Strategy: AI autonomously initiates workflows by analysing procurement documents and business needs. It summarizes requirements, recommends appropriate contract types, and interacts directly with stakeholders via conversational interfaces.

  Impact: Reduces manual intake processes and ensures faster, policy compliant contract initiation.

• Contract Creation: Generates contracts using contextual prompts and smart clause libraries while recommending standardized legal language.

  Impact: Accelerates contract creation while maintaining strict legal consistency and compliance.

• Contract Language Translation: Translates contracts across multiple languages, ensuring contextual accuracy and providing confidence scores to flag areas needing human review.

  Impact: Facilitates seamless cross border contracting with reduced dependency on manual translation.

Stage 2- Negotiate

During negotiation, AI acts as an intelligent co-pilot, identifying risks and guiding strategy to secure optimal terms.

• Negotiation & Supplier Collaboration: Autonomously identifies deviations from standard organizational clauses and suggests fallback clauses alongside negotiation strategies. It also supports real time collaboration between buyers, suppliers, and legal teams.

  Impact: Improves negotiation efficiency and ensures strict alignment with organizational risk policies.

• Contract Due Diligence: Performs multi source analysis and generates risk profiles using historical contracts and external data. It highlights potential legal, financial, and operational risks.

  Impact: Enhances decision making with proactive risk identification, providing actionable insights for legal and business teams.

Stage 3- Approve

Agentic AI accelerates the internal authorization phase by summarizing complex agreements and routing them to the right decision makers without manual intervention.

• Intelligent Routing & Authorization: Based on the contract creation and initiation data, AI maps organizational policies to automatically trigger and route contracts for approval based on complex authority matrices.

• Contract Summarization: Generates concise summaries highlighting key terms, risks, and obligations. AI customizes these summaries for different stakeholders (e.g., finance, legal, executives) and embeds them directly into approval workflows.

  Impact: Enables significantly faster understanding and expedites decision making across enterprise teams.

Stage 4- E-Sign

Digital execution is optimized by removing physical barriers and ensuring a secure, frictionless experience for all parties.

• AI Capabilities: Replaces manual printing and scanning with integrated, mobile friendly digital signatures. It utilizes cryptographically secure audit trails and keeps documents within a single, secure platform.

  Impact: Accelerates revenue recognition by eliminating mailing delays, improves the counterparty experience, and provides superior legal protection compared to physical signatures.

Stage 5- Store

Once finalized, AI ensures that executed contracts are accurately digitized, categorized, and reliably integrated into the enterprise data ecosystem.

• Metadata Extraction: AI agents extract key contract metadata (dates, parties, obligations), validate the extracted data against predefined rules, and automatically update CLM systems with structured information.

  Impact: Eliminates tedious manual data entry and drastically improves data accuracy for downstream analytics.

Stage 6- Track

Post signature, Agentic AI continuously monitors the agreement to ensure obligations are met, mitigating leakage and maximizing value.

• Obligation Monitoring & Compliance: Extracts compliance requirements, tracks fulfilment against agreed terms, and triggers automated alerts/workflows for upcoming or missed obligations.

  Impact: Strengthens compliance and reduces the risk of costly penalties or breaches.

• Amendments, Expirations, & Renewals: Actively monitors expiration dates and renewal clauses. AI goes a step further to recommend renewal strategies, propose renegotiation actions, and automate amendment workflows.

  Impact: Prevents missed renewals and optimizes contract value over the long term.

• Contract Analytics: Enables natural language search across vast contract repositories. AI identifies hidden patterns, trends, and anomalies, ultimately generating predictive analytics and dashboards.

  Impact: Transforms static, dormant contracts into dynamic strategic assets through rich, data driven insights.

Related Podcasts: CLM Simplified: From Theory to Real Outcomes ft. Lucy Bassli

Case Study: Streamlining Execution with Volody CLM

The Challenge: Overcoming the "Wet Signature" Bottleneck

Traditional manual signing processes involving printing, scanning, and physical couriers create significant friction, delaying deal closures and slowing revenue recognition. Furthermore, physical signatures are prone to tampering, loss, and legal exposure, while switching between disconnected signing tools increases security risks.

The Solution: Integrated, Agentic Execution

Volody’s integrated platform transforms this liability into a strategic advantage by embedding secure digital execution directly into the contract workflow.

• End Tool Juggling: By providing an all in one environment, Volody ensures documents remain secure, intact, and fully auditable from creation to final signature.

• Frictionless Experience: The platform offers an intuitive, mobile friendly interface that delights counterparties, ensuring high completion rates and faster turnaround times.

• Superior Legal Protection: Volody utilizes cryptographically secure signatures and tamper proof audit trails, offering a level of legal certainty that paper based processes cannot match.

The Result: From Signature to Strategy

Once the contract is executed within Volody, Agentic AI immediately takes over. It autonomously extracts key metadata and obligations, validating the data against predefined rules to update the CLM system instantly. This seamless transition ensures that once a deal is signed, it is immediately tracked for compliance and renewal, eliminating manual data entry and preventing value leakage.

Related Articles: Transitioning from Wet Ink to eSignatures: Effective Guide