What’s so great about contract life cycle management? Isn’t it basically just a digitized cardboard box filled with old contracts, kept merely for compliance purposes? Not with new machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies baked in, it’s not.

We’ve entered the third phase of CLM, according to Bob DeSantis (pictured, left), chief operating officer of AppExtremes LLC (doing business as Conga). “Having machine-readable data in a repository is great, but what’s actually in the contract?” DeSantis asked. “What did we negotiate six months ago now could have an impact on our business if we knew it, if we could act on it.”

Conga is charging into the new era of CLM with machine learning and artificial intelligence technology — some of which is folded into the business through acquisitions. “With conga AI and … machine learning … that we’ve now embedded in our CLM products, we can unlock the data that’s hidden in documents and make it actionable for our customers,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis and Jason Gabbard (pictured, right), head of AI strategy at Conga, spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Conga Connect West event in San Francisco. They discussed how ML and AI are reshaping CLM. (* Disclosure below.)

Driving a hard bargain with AI software

Conga’s CLM system is getting smarter all the time, Gabbard explained. It is even beginning to recognize patterns and make suggestions. “You may load a document in it, and, say, you might see a pop up over in the margin that says, ‘Hey, is this a limitation or liability clause?'”

Data that is lost or forgotten within contracts can have material value to users. “We recently had a customer that negotiated a payment term to their benefit with one of their suppliers,” DeSantis said. 

Continual retraining of the models on loads of document data will result in sharper insights. For example, the more real estate contracts the system learns, the smarter it will become at making suggestions to makers of new real estate contracts, according to DeSantis.

“Imagine if through Conga AI, we’re able to learn what type of clause structure actually has a higher close rate or a faster cycle time or a higher dollar value for a given book of business,” DeSantis concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Conga Connect West event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Conga Connect West at Dreamforce 2018. Neither Conga, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE