Contract review is a typical case where AI brings obvious benefit: the work is repetitive, the documents are long, and the person doing it spends time on reading rather than on judgement. At the same time it is a process where a mistake costs money. That is why the right question is not “can AI do it?” but “which part do we entrust to the agent and which stays with a person?”.
What the agent can do
- Find and extract the fields: the parties, dates, amounts, payment terms, the period of validity.
- Compare the text with your standard terms and show the places that differ.
- Mark the clauses that usually require attention: penalties, liability, unusual payment terms, automatic renewal.
- Prepare the record for the accounting or ERP system so that the agreed terms do not have to be retyped.
What should stay with a person
- The legal assessment of a risk. The agent shows where to look, and the lawyer decides whether the clause is acceptable.
- The decision to agree or to reject.
- Signing and any commitment on behalf of the company.
- Unusual cases: a scan of poor quality, a non-standard structure, a contract in an unfamiliar language.
How the work should look
- The agent reads the document and proposes the values and the marked places. It writes nothing into your systems yet.
- The lawyer sees each value with a reference to the page it came from, and confirms or corrects it on one screen.
- Only after confirmation are the key fields recorded in the accounting system, with a note of who approved them and when.
This is the principle described in the article about keeping a person in control. The agent starts by only suggesting, and the right to record independently is given later, for selected operations, once its accuracy has been measured.
What the process needs in order to work reliably
- Your standard terms in a written, agreed form. The agent can compare only with something that exists.
- A place to record the result and a safe way to write there. See data exchange before AI.
- Consistent data about counterparties. If the same counterparty is spelled in three ways, the record will be attached to the wrong one. See a single source of trusted data.
- Protection of personal data. Names and contacts are hidden before a document is sent to a cloud model, and every request is recorded.
How to check that it works
Before the launch, record how long one contract takes now, how many are processed per month and how often corrections are needed afterwards. After the pilot, measure the same things. If the agent's proposals match the lawyers' decisions, the share of independent operations can be increased; if not, you will see exactly where it errs. We do not promise a particular figure in advance, because it depends on your documents.
Where to start
Choose one type of contract with a clear structure, for example supply agreements, and run the process on it. The service is described on the page AI agent for document processing. To see the scale of the work for your systems, use the configurator.