Online tradie marketplace, hipages Group is exploring the use of AI to help its team with a variety of use case cases such as contract reviews, summarisation and automating tradie license approvals.
hipages connects tradies and homeowners, enabling the latter to post jobs and receive quotes from the former.
Speaking at a Salesforce event in Sydney, legal counsel and assistant company secretary Lucy Thompson said hipages’ efforts with AI have helped the legal team with “contract reviews in particular, pulling out particularly aggressive contract clauses, [and finding] if there’s anything that’s missing, [and] using it to summarise contracts.”
AI is also “sometimes” being used to generate draft contractual clauses that can then be workshopped further by the legal team.
“As soon as you have something on a piece of paper, it’s so much easier to work with,” Thompson said.
In the future, AI agents could play a role in simplifying the onboarding process for tradies to join the platform.
hipages is currently running a pilot to assess if AI agents can help to “automate our trade license approval and checking process.”
This could assist tradespeople to onboard to the marketplace platform faster, while also freeing up the time of hipages’ staff “to do other, more valuable things.’”
Thompson said the pilot is “going really well” so far.
“If we can get it to work and the accuracy of it is there, then it’s going to save us a lot of time.”
Contract lifecycle management
The work with AI builds on a program of work that has seen the legal team start using DocuSign CLM – contract lifecycle management software.
Thompson said that prior to using CLM, the group had problems with centralised contract storage, and also with keeping track of when contracts with external vendors were coming up for renewal.
“We started off looking actually purely for a contract repository system, and then realised that we could go well beyond that,” she said.
After setting it up as a contract repository, the legal team started to use more functionality including workflows and report-building.
Thompson said that DocuSign also made it easy “to take documents off-platform and then really easily reupload them into DocuSign” again.
“As lawyers, it doesn’t always work, having everything in the platform, especially [for] external vendor or contract negotiation, so that process with DocuSign is really seamless,” Thompson said.
The group is also now using mostly templates for non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), master services agreements (MSAs), sales contracts and the like, which cuts time required for preparation and review.
“People can just click a few buttons, and send out a document for signature,” Thompson said.