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Tom Dunlop, CEO of Summize, explores how businesses can unlock the intelligence hidden in their contracts, using technology to help manage risk, protect revenue and drive growth.
“Contract intelligence” is becoming one of the latest phrases in the legal tech industry. As contracting tools and legal AI become more sophisticated, we’re hearing more and more about the intelligence that can be extracted from the agreements businesses hold.
But contract intelligence itself isn’t new – it’s been sitting inside contracts for decades, whether it’s renewal dates, pricing terms, obligations, liabilities, rights or restrictions. What has changed is our ability to find that information, understand it and act on it.
For most of contracting history, extracting intelligence was doable, but not sustainable. Contracts lived in filing cabinets, shared drives and eventually digital repositories, but they often lost attention as soon as they were signed, until someone needed to refer to them – perhaps when a dispute arose, a renewal approached or a merger came up. At that point, finding what you needed meant opening dozens, if not hundreds, of documents and searching manually. Take it from me, a former tech general counsel, that connecting information across agreements was almost impossible without significant time and resources.
AI and modern contract lifecycle management (CLM) – or contract intelligence – technology changes the economics of that process. Of course, somewhere between the filing cabinets and advanced CLM technology there was Ctrl+F, OCR and image and text recognition technology. But those simply read documents and found the text you were looking for. That’s helpful, but it doesn’t unearth intelligence at scale, and it doesn’t interpret it into the insights that structures the data in your contracts into true, actionable intelligence. And there is a lot to uncover.
Turning contracts into risk intelligence
The first opportunity is perhaps the most obvious: using contract intelligence to strengthen how businesses manage risk.
Take dates. They sound basic, but knowing when thousands of contracts renew, expire or trigger particular obligations can be surprisingly difficult. With the right technology, these dates and provisions can be extracted automatically, helping businesses stay ahead of important milestones, avoid unwanted renewals and make sure key contract terms aren’t overlooked.
The same principle applies to contractual red flags. Lawyers have always redlined contracts and compared clauses, but with AI, it can be done more consistently and at greater scale. Clauses can be compared against an organisation’s preferred position, established playbooks or even thousands of previous agreements. Potential deviations can be surfaced quickly, giving the right people the insight they need to focus their attention where it matters most.
And the opportunity for risk mitigation doesn’t stop when a contract is signed.
Contracts are living business commitments, and circumstances can change through their lifecycles. If a provision changes, an obligation is missed or a particular contractual condition is triggered, technology now exists to help surface that information automatically and prompt the right action.
This shows a significant opportunity for businesses. So much of the intelligence that can help manage contractual risk has always been there, but it’s traditionally been difficult to surface at scale. Today, contracts can become a more dynamic source of knowledge – helping organisations of all sizes spot potential issues earlier, respond more proactively and strengthen how they manage risk through the entire lifecycle of an agreement.
Contracts can also make you money
But risk is only half the story. Businesses are also sitting on commercial intelligence inside their contracts that they haven’t been surfacing effectively – in other words, your contracts could be making you more money, as well as helping you not to lose it.
Think about revenue leakage. A contract might specify a price increase after a certain period, minimum purchasing commitments or particular billing conditions. If those terms aren’t reflected accurately in invoicing or commercial processes, revenue can quietly disappear. Getting the right intelligence out of your contracts can help identify those discrepancies and give commercial teams visibility of where money might be left behind.
The same applies to upselling and cross-selling. A business could have hundreds or thousands of customers, but how many of them have a particular product or service? Which ones have one service but not another? Are there patterns in the contracts that suggest which customers are positioned for a conversation about something more?
This is when sales teams can leverage contract intelligence to prioritise accounts and start to have more informed conversations. Customer success teams can identify opportunities to broaden relationships. Commercial leaders can see where existing customers represent the most potential for growth.
Before, answering those questions might have required multiple teams – legal, sales and finance – to piece together information from different systems. Now you have access to a whole other layer of insight: turning contracts from static documents into living, breathing knowledge across the business.
It can even contribute to revenue forecasting by giving businesses a clearer view of upcoming renewals, contracted revenue, pricing changes and other commercial commitments. The contract stops being something that just records the deal and starts becoming part of the intelligence that informs the next one.
Intelligence is only useful if you act on it
The value comes from having the right technology to surface the information that matters reliably, quickly and without spiralling token consumption. The power comes from turning knowledge and data into an action, whether that’s a flag, alert, workflow, prompt or conversation.
The more context you give a contract intelligence tool, the more useful it becomes. A playbook or your history of approved positions can tell a system what good looks like. Historical decisions can provide insight into how a legal team has handled similar situations before. Existing contracts can provide a reference point for identifying deviations and trends.
For years, businesses have been sitting on a vast, largely untapped source of organisational intelligence. We just didn’t have the means to surface it. Now we do, and most organisations have a library of signed contracts already, they’re just not able to leverage them. So the next question for your business is simple: how much intelligence is sitting on your contracts – and what could you do with it if you could actually see it?
To learn more about Summize’s contract intelligence platform, please visit www.summize.com
By Tom Dunlop, CEO of Summize