Making the Business Case for AI Contract Intelligence
Close Contracts Faster. Free Up Resources. Reduce Errors. Automate Reporting.
✅ You found a solution that you trust - The solution will (1) enable strategic decisions on what to negotiate, (2) accelerate and improve contract review (and do some of the “grunt work”), and (3) extract value from executed contracts.
✅ The solution fits with your existing workflow - The solution can be used in Word, connected to existing systems, and requires minimal contract reviewer training.
✅ The team is excited - The POC blew everyone’s mind, the issue spotting was accurate, the redlines are elegant, the additional AI assists will save time and make the work easier.
❌ The solution costs money and it’s not in your current budget - Crap
Turn that ❌ into a ✅ by making the right business case!
Here Is How You Do It
Understand The Benefits AI Contract Intelligence Provides
Understand The Benefits AI Contract Intelligence Provides
💡 Custom Playbook Distillation - ensuring the reviews follow your risk appetite, fallback language and internal style
👀 Red Flag Detection - ensuring key issues are caught and addressed
🖊️ Elegant Redlining - saving time making the required changes that don’t require deal-specific considerations
📊 Contract Data Insights - providing insights into how you’ve negotiated contracts in the past and enabling automated extraction from executed contracts for strategic decision-making and effective operations
😀 Ease of Use - making users happy through integration in Word for intuitive user experience and integrations with CLMs and other systems to automate legal workflows and data distribution
Convince Your Internal Stakeholders
“You're gonna love this, here's why!"
Most of your internal stakeholders probably want faster turnaround times, more self-help, and information about contract terms. Give them a vision of what the future could look like - give them a sense of what contracts would they now handle on their own, what types of reductions on turnaround time you are likely to achieve for them, and what contract data they will receive and where it will live.
Here is an example we’ve seen with our customers, where Dioptra enables multiple departments to work more efficiently and collaboratively through integrations with existing systems.
- Legal benefits from accelerated and consistent contract reviews
- Finance benefits from automated accurate revenue recognition and risk reporting immediately at contract close
- Sales and procurement benefit from self-serve contract triaging and self-management of low risk contracts
- Revenue operations benefits from extraction data automatically populating CRM and AP systems to streamline renewals, billing, and account management
Demonstrating cross-functional value will help decision makers see the potential impact as a long-term, strategic investment.
Make The Joint Business Case
“We’re all in this together!”
Use quotes from your stakeholders to show that there is a shared objective that benefits multiple teams.e.g. “Sales loves working with legal, but sees a lot of bottlenecks due to lack of capacity. This solution will help us improve deal velocity by increasing the speed of and sharing the responsibility for contract review.”
Use any data you have available to tell the return on investment (ROI) story and use a chart or a spreadsheet to show the math.
To help, here are some numbers that we are seeing from our customers on time savings for initial contract reviews:
- 90%+ on simple 1st and 3rd party paper agreements (NDAs, sponsorship, etc)
- 70% on complex 1st party paper agreements
- 80% on complex 3rd party paper agreements
Example spreadsheet content for demonstrating ROI on using AI contract intelligence for initial contract reviews for sales:
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Contract Type
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Est. Vol.
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Current Initial Response Time
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Avg Legal Review Hour/Contract
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Future Plan With Solution
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Estimated Future Initial Response Time
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Estimated Velocity Improvements
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Estimated Future Legal Review Hours/Contract
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Estimated Legal Hours Saved
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E.g. NDA, MSA, DPA and paper type (own form or counterparty)
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How many are being reviewed by legal today
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The average time from intake to return
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The average number of legal review hours
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Automated, self-help, AI-assisted legal review
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The expected new average time from intake to return
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The delta between the current turnaround times and the future turnaround times.
Work with sales to estimate impact of improved deal velocity on revenues
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The expected new average number of legal review hours
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The delta between the current number of legal review hours and the future legal review hours
Look at the approx hourly cost of your contract review team members to estimate the savings.
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There is also ROI for AI contract intelligence beyond speed:
- Automated Reporting - most companies don’t have data on their contract terms, when they do it is typically limited to party names and dates - AI contract intelligence can extract an unlimited number of relevant contract data points - the ROI on this is driven by the time savings of any current extraction work, the contract compliance related losses that could have been prevented had the contract terms been known, and the potential untapped contract value that has been being missed
- Strategic Insights - Surfacing of past redline positions improves organizational decision-making on negotiation, the ROI on this is a reduction in the total number of negotiation rounds through informed, strategic decision-making and embedded knowledge sharing.
- Reduction of Redlining Errors - our customers are seeing a 15% reduction in errors due to issue spotting and typos - if the company has data on contract disputes or customer concessions, explore whether any of those disputes or concessions are the result of redlining errors.
Decision-Maker Bonus
“I can help you succeed too!”
The decision-maker is usually also an internal stakeholder. If it is finance, consider highlighting the benefits of contract data extraction - e.g. facilitation of accounts payable operations and renewal procedures through automated feeds with the relevant contract data; and automated reports for Revenue Recognition reporting. If the decision maker is in the legal department, consider highlighting what would be done with the provided time savings, the upleveling of the team and shortened onboarding times, and the benefits of having reports on the risk allocations in the contracts, plus of course, how you will make your stakeholders happy.
Closing Thoughts
Making a business case means understanding the larger company ecosystem and the contracting needs of your stakeholder teams, whether it is contracting speed, contract data, or changes to contract terms. In the end, it is about knowing your audience and thinking about how your desired solution creates meaningful organizational benefits.
Let us help you hit all your ✅s for AI contract intelligence, click here to get your personalized ROI calculation.
Additional Resources
Are You Ready To Make The Most of AI? A guide on leveraging AI in contracting
