What is Intelligent Contract Management? A Beginner's Guide

Contracts are fundamental to business operations, yet managing them efficiently remains a challenge. Traditional contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems often focus on document storage rather than extracting actionable insights. Enter Intelligent Contract Management (ICM)—an advanced AI-driven approach designed to enhance contract processes from intake to analysis, ensuring greater accuracy, efficiency, and compliance.

^{What is Intelligent Contract Management}

Intelligent Contract Management (ICM) refers to the use of AI-driven assistants that proactively manage contract-related activities. Unlike conventional CLM platforms, which often serve as document repositories, ICM leverages AI in the form of AI Assistants to analyze contracts, detect risks, extract insights, and streamline workflows autonomously and without extensive human intervention.

Similarly, SimpliContract’s Intelligent Contract Management is equipped with state–of- the- art AI- powered contract assistants that can seamlessly handle complex processes, streamline workflows in end-to-end contracting lifecycles. It leverages the advanced AI capabilities of goal-specific AI assistants to automate tasks, enhance efficiency, productivity, streamlining contracting processes in verticals like legal, procurement, IT, finance, sales, manufacturing, retail, real estate, healthcare. The intelligent system allows seamless integration with varied platforms such as Sap Ariba, Coupa, Salesforce CRM, Google workspace, etc., allowing organizations to optimize contract performance while ensuring compliance with regulatory and corporate policies.

^{Digital Assistants}

AI-assistants are highly proactive, in contrast to traditional AI agentic platforms like GenAI or ML models that work reactively based on mandatory units such as prompts or any commands pretrained. The contracting assistants are intelligent AI-colleagues that automatically engage with contracting workflows, processes, leading to enhanced productivity and efficiency in the ecosystem. In a way, AI contracting assistants help in augmenting legal and procurement teams in varied ways, for instance, collaborating online with various departments for simultaneous reviewing, parallel approvals that leads to a faster contract execution process.

^{How Intelligent Contract Management Works}

ICM uses AI assistants that are adaptive, no-code goal-driven personalized AI assistants capable of tackling real-life contracting challenges.

AI assistants can manage complex tasks due to their deeper context management and analytics capabilities. They help streamline contracting by prioritizing tasks, extract valuable insights for data-driven decisions.

Automate repetitive tasks, free-up time for legal teams to focus on strategic work rather than mundane administrative tasks.

Task routing and collaboration capabilities ensure that in a multi-assistant environment/system, the right assistants take up the right tasks at the right time making contracting seamless and efficient to the core.

Unlike traditional AI models that rely on user prompts, ICM AI assistants operate autonomously, anticipating contract needs and providing proactive recommendations.

^{Features to Bank On: Use Cases}

Meta Data Extraction: AI contracting assistants can extract required meta data from contracts, leading to contract visibility for improved outcomes. They prevent manual data entry and other manual tasks in the process. For example, SimpliContract’s data extractor can do this work effortlessly in seconds with maximum accuracy.

Contract Review & Analysis: AI powered assistants like data extractor automatically review, analyze contracts to identify key clauses, terms & conditions.

Risk Detection & Mitigate: Risk analyzer, an AI assistant, detects potential risks, gives recommendations to mitigate those risks.

Automatic Alerts for Contract Renewal & Expiry: Next-GenAI-enabled AI assistant sends alerts for contract renewals and expirations automatically, ensuring timely actions.

Contract Regulatory Compliance Monitoring: AI assistants have this mandatory feature of compliance monitoring to see if contracts do comply with regulatory requirements, company policies and legal standards.
Monitoring Supplier Performance: AI assistants like Workflow Operator AI Assistant monitor supplier performances facilitating data-driven decisions.

Supporting Contract Negotiation: Intelligent AI assistants have this negotiation support feature by analyzing contract terms, offering automated suggestions suiting the company's best interests, suggesting optimal outcomes.

Customizable Dashboards: AI –powered assistants create customizable dashboards for CLM process, enabling easy tracking and analysis.

Real-time Contract Visibility: AI assistants like Report Builder AI Assistant provide real-time visibility into contract status, terms, and conditions.

Seamless Integration with Existing Platforms: AI assistants like Workflow Operator integrate seamlessly with existing CLM platforms such as Sap Ariba, Coupa, CRMs, ERP systems and so on.

For instance, a procurement team can use ICM to assess vendor compliance and track contract performance, ensuring suppliers meet agreed-upon terms. Meanwhile, a legal team can leverage AI-powered assistants to automate contract analysis, freeing time for higher-value negotiations and strategy.

^{How ICM Differs from Traditional CLM}

Traditional CLM platforms primarily serve as repositories for contract storage and retrieval. While useful for organization, they often struggle with:

Limited automation and workflow capabilities

Minimal data extraction and analytics functionality

Inability to proactively identify and mitigate risks

Lack of seamless integration with other enterprise systems

In contrast, ICM actively manages contracts throughout their lifecycle, using AI-powered decision-making to improve accuracy, efficiency, and risk management.

^‍^{SimpliContract’s Intelligent Contract Management Trusted by Global Organizations}

SimpliContract’s AI-assistants are autonomous applications that are always-on, designed to handle specialized tasks according to their specific roles. These intelligent contracting assistants augment legal and procurement teams, handling the mundane, so the rest of the teams can focus on strategic tasks.

With AI-powered assistants at its core, SimpliContract’s NextGen-Intelligent Contract Management platform redefines enterprise CLMs. It streamlines contracting by handling the busy work, surfacing insights on what to prioritize, and adapting to the organization's evolving needs—so legal and procurement teams can focus on strategic work.

Spotlight on AI assistants for seamless contracting:

Assistant #1 Data Extractor: Converts contracts into data points to drive insights. Extract contract terms, clauses, obligations, with context from all contracts to unlock deeper insights.

Assistant #2 Risk Analyzer: Gives risk scores via classifying contract clauses as high, medium, or low risk in real-time. Offers suggestions and alternatives to mitigate risks.

Assistant #3 Data Explorer: It answers any contract question in seconds. Provides instant answers to specific questions about single contracts or the entire contract repository.

Assistnat#4 Workflow Operator: Orchestrate workflows that adapt to the unique needs of every business relationship, system, information, and people involved. Enable self-serve intakes across IT, HR, CRM, etc.

Assistant #5 Report Builder: It generates on-demand reports and dashboards. Turns contract data and performance insights into impactful, detailed reports through a simple, conversational interface.

SimpliContract's intelligent contract management platform facilitates new contractual savings and prevents leakages, recommends AI-driven risk mitigations, and reduces low-value workload through validated, AI-powered workflows. Explore how this platform can transform your legal and procurement teams’ journey driving revenue goals. Book a demo.

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