IBM Watson has certainly come a long way since playing against human players — and winning millions of dollars on the game show, Jeopardy! The artificial intelligence (AI) still analyzes vast amounts of data and interprets and answers questions asked in a human language. It can perform human tasks in a fraction of a second. However, it has quickly become the “gold standard for purposeful analytics processing.” In fact, as new data is added to its repository, Watson uses machine learning to build on its knowledge of certain areas and deliver even deeper insight to users, such as contract management AI.
Distinguishing IBM Watson AI the most is its business problem-solving, of course. It immediately recognizes human speech patterns before quickly analyzing massive amounts of data. It marries the uniquely human qualities of common sense, self-directed goals, and ethical values with data analytics and statistical reasoning.
In a previous blog post, I discussed what IBM Watson AI is and how it is being used in contract management more broadly. Here, I explain how ContractPodAi uses IBM Watson AI — in combination with other technology — to power our contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution for chief legal officers (CLOs), general counsels (GCS), and other legal professionals.
Viewing the Multiple Dimensions of AI
Today, the majority of legal technology solutions on the market only include a couple of dimensions of AI. But end-to-end contract management systems (CMS), like ContractPodAi, offer a range of features and functionalities that are based on this technology. You can view them, in part, along the lines of multidimensional AI.
ContractPodAi combines advanced, proprietary algorithms with marketing-leading IBM Watson Discovery and Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services, as well as machine learning and natural language processing. Together, they bring the multiple dimensions of AI, including the following:
Cognitive Discovery Search:
You can conduct advanced searches and read all contracts in your repository with features, like auto-complete, geospatial search, filtering, and faceting capabilities, and advanced cognitive searchability. Beyond AI search capabilities like optical character recognition (OCR), cognitive discovery search involves enhanced keyphrase extraction, fuzzy searches, text pre-population, and named entity recognition. Basically, it pulls contract data from undifferentiated text or image files. It then makes that same data indexable and retrievable during full-text search queries.
Third-Party Contract Risk and Compliance:
With element classification AI tech, you can better review third-party agreements against the pre-defined contractual playbooks. You can analyze these particular contracts, identifying any risk issues and non-compliant contractual text. You can negotiate agreements more speedily and ensure compliance in the contractual sense. And just as importantly, you can evaluate all of the other dangers lurking in contracts, remaining aware of potential exposure and “risk-scoring.”
AI-Powered Obligation Management:
You can analyze, interpret, and automatically abstract legal obligations with best-in-class natural language processing (NLP) technology and a legal language knowledge studio. With AI-powered obligation management, you can also receive reports for all contractual obligations, whether they are added to the system by hand or by AI technology.
Contract Analyst Chatbot:
With virtual contract analysts driven by NLP technology and AI capabilities, you can receive, print, or email reports produced by the AI instead of opening legal documents every time you have a question. These proprietary chatbots — located at the contract record level — interpret and respond to all queries related to agreements.
Cognitive Contract Translation:
You can translate whole agreements and related documents in a number of languages — and preserve much-needed context — with the help of neural machine translation. Cognitive contract translation is one of the most advanced technologies for legal professionals. When you make agreement-related queries in your language of choice, the AI also translates the search into one of more than 60 languages. Then, it shows results in your preferred language, together with the visualization of translated terms and clauses within contracts.
Getting the Most from Contract Management AI
When it comes to building AI-powered contract management solutions, advanced proprietary algorithms and enhanced legal engineering capabilities certainly go a long way. This holistic approach involves embedding “AI into the fundamental steps of the contracting process.” This is instead of applying AI to only “one or two specific tasks, such as automating third-party contract reviews,” according to Gartner.
In its report on legal and compliance automation, Gartner recognizes vendors “that use process design, content services, and user experience to improve established legal and compliance workflows.” It highlights legal departments and companies, which adopt and implement a CMS with AI and advanced analytics, in particular.
For starters, AI contracting software offers a good business return on investment (ROI) and a slew of individual benefits. According to 85 percent of in-house corporate counsel surveyed by ContractPodAi in 2020, those benefits include providing consistency from lawyer to lawyer.
Reaping the Benefits of IBM Watson AI
By embedding IBM Watson AI — and other technology — in your contract management solution, legal professionals can accelerate the assembly of sell-side contracts while fast-tracking reviews for buy-side ones. You can compare contract terms against historical agreements and review individual contract clauses — simply yet thoroughly. And you can parse thousands of agreements and their metadata, and transform contract insights into intelligence.
By receiving the full support of AI like this, the legal department can begin to see the following benefits:
- Prevent CLM delays, productivity impediments, or extended negotiations
- Contain total costs of contracts written in a complex language, including elaborate terms, or extending through multiple renewal cycles, etc.
- Manage risks in the face of increased regulatory requirements—for transparency—and the accelerated pacing of business
Ultimately, it is time for CLOs, GCs, and other legal professionals to lead in their companies. And that requires adopting and implementing a contract management solution, which is supported by reliable artificial intelligence like IBM Watson.
So, are you interested in deploying contract management software in your corporate legal division and enterprise? Check out our white paper on “How to Choose a Contract Management Solution,” and find tactical frameworks so you can adopt and implement our solution for your business.
Author:
Anurag Malik
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