Icertis has announced two new applications powered by Artificial Intelligence for the Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform: ICM DigitizeAI and ICM DiscoverAI. The new applications leverage the Microsoft AI services from the Azure platform to leverage the data found in contracts.
ICM DigitizeAI imports legacy contracts and maps attributes and clauses contained therein. This allows better analysis of contracts, mapping similarities and identifying variations between clauses.
ICM DiscoverAI analyses the data collected and matches clauses and attributes found in every clause to common clause libraries. It enables business to identify non-standard and key contract clauses during the contract review process.
The solutions leverage various services on the Microsoft AI platform. This includes Text Analytics, Bing Entity Search API and the Translator Text API. Icertis also uses the Azure Machine Learning Package for Text Analytics to train custom models. These form part of the Icertis patent-pending algorithms pipeline.
Joseph Sirosh, CVP of Cloud AI Platform at Microsoft Corp: “Our goal at Microsoft is to accelerate our customer’s digital transformation by taking advantage of the power of data, AI and cloud computing. Icertis works with many brands across key industry segments and we are working with Icertis to help our joint customers optimize their commercial foundation using Icertis’ AI-infused enterprise contract management solutions built on Microsoft Azure AI.”
Driving customer benefits
There is huge value tied up, or lost within customer contracts for any organisation. These new features target those clauses and features that companies can use to either increase revenues or decrease costs.
Icertis cited two customers that are already using the AI apps. Automobile manufacturer Daimler deployed the ICM platform last year. It has improved the efficiency of its procurement process with the use of the AI apps. The company has reduced risk and improved compliance with its ability to discover discrepancies in legacy contracts.
The second customer using the apps is Vertiv, (formerly Emerson Network Power). It is a global manufacturer and services provider for corporate data centers. They used the AI tools to surface risks and obligations within historic sales contracts.
Companies will often find clauses, agreed with customers on an adhoc basis, that were part of the negotiation process and now forgotten. These can highlight risks that companies can mitigate against or potentially missed revenue.
Samir Bodas, CEO and Co-founder of Icertis commented: “For the first time in history, contracts are being digitized. Icertis is applying AI to this new pool of digitized data that previously never existed – reimagining enterprise contract management so contracts can interact with humans, surround systems and even other contracts. We are redefining the contract management space to deliver the next quantum leap in value to our customers.”
What does this mean
Icertis are the latest vendor to apply AI to contract life cycle management. Last year Apttus announced Apttus Contract Management with Applied Artificial Intelligence (AAI). The Apttus solution also leverages the Microsoft AI stack. The ICM platform already manages more than five million contracts. It already has an impressive list of customers including 3M, Daimler, Microsoft, Roche and Wipro.
Founded in 2009 Icertis was recently boosted with a $50 million Series D funding round led by Meritech Capital partners. It now appears on both Gartner and Forrester reports for its sector and is a company that seems to be going places. This latest announcement sees it match some of the functionality of its larger competitors and it is catching up fast.