For a long time, contract lifecycle management software was the default answer to the question of how organizations should manage their agreements. Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platforms promised to bring order to contract chaos: a central repository, automated workflows, standardized templates, and a trail of every signed document. For many organizations, they delivered on those promises, at least partially.
But something shifted. Legal teams that had invested heavily in CLM implementations were still spending weeks on contract reviews. Procurement teams were still signing agreements with terms they did not fully understand. Sales cycles were still stalling at the contract stage. The system was organized, but the underlying problems remained.
That gap between organized and actually functional is exactly where intelligent contract solutions have found their footing.
What Traditional CLM Was Built to Do
To understand why organizations are moving away from traditional CLM systems, it helps to be clear about what those systems were actually designed for in the first place.
Storage and Workflow, Not Analysis
Traditional CLM platforms were designed around a specific set of problems: contracts getting lost, renewal dates being missed, and different teams using different templates. CLM systems addressed all of this with reasonable effectiveness, storing documents in one place, routing them through defined approval steps, and surfacing reminders when action was needed.
For organizations coming from a world of shared drives and email threads, that represented genuine progress.
Where the Model Hit Its Limits
Storing and routing contracts is not the same as understanding them. A CLM system can tell you that a contract was signed on a particular date and went through four approval steps. It cannot tell you whether the indemnification clause creates disproportionate exposure or whether the data handling obligations are compatible with current regulatory requirements.
The gap tends to show up most visibly in a few recurring situations:
- A contract is signed and filed correctly, but it contains a liability clause that nobody flagged during review
- A vendor agreement auto-renews because a reminder got buried, and the window to renegotiate passed unnoticed
- Legal is asked to review fifty vendor contracts in a quarter, with no systematic way to prioritize which ones carry real risk
- A procurement team approves a data processing agreement without the context to assess whether its terms meet current privacy standards
None of these are storage or workflow failures. They are analysis failures, and no amount of process improvement inside a traditional CLM system addresses them.
The Shift Toward Contract Intelligence
The move toward contract intelligence solutions is not just a technology trend. It reflects a genuine change in what organizations need from their contracting infrastructure.
From Managing Contracts to Understanding Them
Contract intelligence solutions take a fundamentally different approach. Rather than focusing on where contracts live and how they move through an organization, they focus on what contracts actually say and what that means for the business.
A team using intelligent contract solutions does not just know that a contract exists and when it renews. They know whether its terms are typical for the vendor category, which clauses fall outside acceptable parameters, and what the realistic risk profile looks like before anyone signs.
That shift from document management to contract comprehension changes what is possible at every stage: intake, review, negotiation, and ongoing management.
Benchmarking as a Core Capability
One of the most practically valuable things contract intelligence solutions do is give organizations an external reference point for evaluating terms. Without benchmarking data, reviewers rely on institutional memory and individual judgment. With it, they can compare specific clauses against a large body of real-world agreements and get an objective read on where a contract sits relative to market norms.
This changes the negotiation dynamic considerably. Instead of two parties arguing from subjective positions, both sides can work from a shared understanding of what is standard, which tends to compress negotiation cycles and reduce unnecessary friction.
Why Organizations Are Making the Switch
The decision to move toward contract intelligence solutions rarely happens overnight. It usually follows a period of frustration with what existing tools can actually deliver.
The CLM Investment Did Not Solve the Analysis Problem
Many organizations invested in CLM platforms, expecting that better process management would translate into better contract outcomes. In practice, that connection was weaker than anticipated. A well-organized repository does not produce fewer problematic agreements. It just means problematic agreements are easier to find after the fact.
Legal teams that were stretched thin before CLM often remained stretched thin after, because the volume of work had not changed, and the tools had not reduced the cognitive load of actual contract review.
Intelligent Solutions Work Across Teams, Not Just Legal
Traditional CLM systems were primarily legal-facing tools. The broader organization interacted with them through approval workflows and signature requests, but the substantive capabilities stayed concentrated in one department.
Intelligent contract solutions distribute contract knowledge more broadly:
- Procurement can assess vendor terms during intake and flag agreements that fall outside acceptable risk parameters
- Sales can understand how their standard agreements compare to what buyers typically encounter, reducing friction from one-sided terms
- Finance can identify financial exposure before contracts are finalized, rather than during the audit
- RevOps can pinpoint where deals are stalling in the contract stage and address systemic bottlenecks
- Legal can focus its bandwidth on high-risk agreements instead of spending equal time on contracts that pose no real concern
That cross-functional utility makes adoption easier to achieve because every team gets direct value rather than simply feeding a system that someone else benefits from.
Speed Has Become a Competitive Requirement
In B2B sales and procurement, how quickly an organization moves from agreement in principle to a signed contract has become a meaningful competitive factor. Buyers gravitate toward vendors who make the contracting process easier.
Automated clause flagging, instant benchmarking, and objective risk scoring compress initial triage from hours to minutes. Legal attention gets focused on agreements that genuinely need it, while routine contracts move through without unnecessary delay.
What the Transition Actually Looks Like in Practice
Making the move toward intelligent contract solutions raises practical questions about implementation and what to do with existing infrastructure.
Not a Rip-and-Replace Decision
Switching does not always mean discarding the CLM entirely. Many organizations run both, using their CLM for storage and workflow while layering intelligence capabilities on top for analysis and benchmarking. The two functions are genuinely complementary when each is doing what it was designed to do.
What changes is where the analytical work happens. Rather than relying on individual reviewers to assess risk from scratch on every agreement, intelligent contract solutions generate objective signals early in the process so human judgment gets applied where it adds the most value.
What to Look for in a Contract Intelligence Solution
Not all contract intelligence solutions are built the same way. Organizations evaluating options should pay close attention to the following:
- How many real-world contracts does the benchmarking database include, and how current is it?
- Does the solution cover the specific contract types most relevant to the organization, such as NDAs, DPAs, SaaS, and enterprise software agreements?
- Can non-legal stakeholders act on the results without requiring legal interpretation at every step?
- Is AI analysis validated by human legal experts, or left entirely to automated outputs?
The answers to these questions determine whether a contract intelligence solution actually changes how the organization operates or simply adds another layer of technology to the same underlying process.
The Practical Case for Making the Move
Traditional CLM systems solved real problems, and for many organizations, they remain a useful part of the contracting infrastructure. But they were built for a version of the contracting problem that did not require AI-powered analysis, market benchmarking, or cross-functional intelligence distribution.
The growing adoption of intelligent contract solutions reflects a clear-eyed assessment of where the remaining friction lives. Managing contracts is largely a solved problem. Understanding them, at scale and with enough speed to keep pace with modern deal cycles, is where the meaningful work is now concentrated.
Organizations that make that shift tend to find that the benefits extend well beyond the legal department, which is precisely what makes contract intelligence solutions a different kind of investment than the CLM platforms that came before.
(Photo by Conny Schneider on Unsplash)
