Ironclad’s new contract platform embeds AI to improve business workflows

Ironclad yesterday unveiled a new version of its contract platform embedded with an AI layer in an effort to improve business workflows throughout the lifecycle of a contract.

Organizations can create contracts 60% faster by automating the contract creation process, according to Jason Boehmig, the company’s CEO and co-founder. They will also have the capability to “slice and dice” all the operational data in previously executed contracts, he said. 

“They have a whole mountain of contracts that existed before they worked with us’’ that are static PDFs, Boehmig told VentureBeat. Ironclad Smart Import uses optical character recognition (OCR) to convert PDF files to DOCX when editing documents. The software scans, indexes, tags, and stores contract data at scale. The new platform is designed to make contracts full-text searchable, automate data extraction, and extract key terms — such as renewal dates. 

This way, a company’s customer support team can reach out to a customer to see if they are going to renew a contract, Boehmig explained. “If you miss that, you lose revenue. “Now, [contracts] … are fully living, breathing documents because of the AI analysis that went into tagging them and making them searchable.”

The AI functionality also makes it possible to recognize who needs to approve a contract and automatically route it to them, he said. 

The new world of contract creation

Also yesterday, Ironclad launched in beta Ironclad Playbooks, which uses AI-powered clause detection so customers can review and negotiate contracts. Playbooks is designed to automatically analyze contracts and flags areas that require a thorough review and provide suggestions on how to negotiate based on legal-approved guidelines, the company said.

Contract creation in the “old world looks like a human with a checklist reading contracts line by line and checking off boxes and making sure every sentence complies with the checklist,” Cai GoGwilt, co-founder and CTO at Ironclad, told VentureBeat. That person would have to do negotiations using a redlining process and go back and forth over email or write things out and scan them in, he added. “The new world is accelerating that” using AI to “intelligently negotiate and review contracts at scale.”

The software scans every part of the contract and matches it to the organization’s preconfigured playbooks and tracks whether every line in the playbook is in compliance and suggests language that can be swapped in, GoGwilt said. “It’s contextual and empowers the user to make better decisions more quickly.” 

“When you’re dealing with 20- to 30-page vendor contracts, the manual review process takes a massive amount of time – but it’s critical work,” said Charles Hurr, associate general counsel at L’Oréal, in a statement. “Ironclad AI automatically reviews these contracts, flags language and clauses that don’t work for us, and suggests L’Oréal-approved provisions to swap in.”

This cuts the review process from hours to minutes, Hurr said, and improves his team’s efficiency, freeing up time for people to focus on more high-impact work.

“Our goal is to keep legal out of 95% of our contracts, and Ironclad’s AI-driven workflows, permission controls, and analytics get us there,” Catherine Choe, director of legal at Everlaw, said in a statement. “Ironclad has helped our team facilitate growth by dramatically speeding up the contract upload and review process, all while maintaining compliance and mitigating risk.”

AI and analytics

Ironclad said the new AI tools come on the heels of the release of Ironclad Insights, a contract analytics and visualization platform. Because Ironclad automatically captures both metadata and process data, Insights is designed to let users create visualizations of crucial operational and business data to make faster decisions, pinpoint bottlenecks, and present findings in a digestible way for key stakeholders.

Pricing for the new platform is based on the number of users, Ironclad said.
Earlier this year, Ironclad announced it had raised $150 million in Series E financing from Franklin Templeton, a global investment management firm, bringing its total financing to $333 million.