Ever wanted to ask about the contracts in your organisation? Ever wanted to ask how many contracts have penalty clauses or do not reference GDPR? Agiloft has launched ConvoAI to deliver just such conversations for organisations. The announcement was made today at the annual Agiloft Convention, the Agiloft Summit.
ConvoAI is powered by Cognizer’s Genius Platform and delivers a text-based intuitive conversational interface to the Agiloft Contract Lifecycle Management platform. The new interface will roll out initially to US and European customers and is free for the first ten users. After that, it only adds $15 per user per month.
Organisations will be able to quickly determine whether the time saved through its introduction will make the investment worthwhile. It may not be suitable for every user, and some may prefer a more traditional interface or not have the requirement for such as tool.
Andy Wishart, Agiloft Chief Product Officer, commented, “Today marks an important day for AI in CLM. Extending our open and scalable Agiloft AI platform to integrate with Cognizer’s Genius™ platform provides new ways for organizations to unlock information in unstructured contracts.
“Our new ConvoAI feature not only enables contract operations professionals to search and find information more easily, but it will also help these professionals drive greater adoption of CLM across the enterprise by providing business users with an intuitive way to query the contracts they are responsible for, and find the data they need, to speed value creation in their organizations.”
Enterprise Times also asked Wishart some questions about the announcement.
More details about ConvoAI
Initially, users can opt to use ConvoAI as a natural language interface for Agiloft. They can also leverage the conversational AI platform through Teams. Enterprise Times asked Wishart whether the company would extend this to Slack as well?
Wishart replied, “For now, the ConvoAI capability is available through the Agiloft UI and Agiloft for Microsoft Teams. An Agiloft for Slack app is on our backlog. That’s what we are continuously prioritizing and researching along with a wide range of other strategic and customer-led ideas. If an Agiloft for Slack app is developed it would be our intention to also support ConvoAI within that app.”
Wishart also confirmed customers would see the availability of ConvoAI in March for US users and April for EMEA customers. Agiloft intends these initial deployments to provide a learning curve for the solution. It will then add more features before rolling out the product further afield. There is, therefore, no firm timeline for this. With a rollout in EMEA, what about language support?
Wishart answered: “The AI has been trained on English language contracts. Our goal is to extend this to non-English languages, but we do not have a firm timeline for that just yet.”
ConvoAI acts as another user interface for the Agiloft solution. It was implemented as an OEM technology which means it is now part of the Agiloft platform. It also means that standard user permissions apply, so only users with access to certain contract information will receive responses to relevant questions.
Contract data never leaves the Agiloft platform, meaning there are no added data privacy risks. Wishart confirmed this by saying, “All customer contract data processed by ConvoAI is held in cloud services entirely under Agiloft control.“
The tech behind ConvoAI
ConvoAI is powered by the Genius Technology from Cognizer. It will continue to develop the code base and sell it independently. This will enable Agiloft to take advantage of updates and ensure they are at the forefront of this modern AI. What will be interesting to see is whether Cognizer develops a voice interface.
It leverages both natural language AI and graph database technologies to learn and surface answers to questions and insights about the contract data. Agiloft is not the first software vendor it has worked with. It also has integrations with Box, Adobe and Conga (Apptus).
ConvoAI takes advantage of Cognizer’s Cortex Neural Vector Engine. It learns the content of contracts, creating connections and insights for users to surface with insightful questions. It has also ingested over 500,000 annotated samples, and Agiloft customers can now layer intelligence about their own contracts.
Jack Porter, Founder and CEO of Cognizer, commented, “We could not be more excited to partner with CLM powerhouse Agiloft to deliver the next generation of AI-powered contract and conversational intelligence to enterprises worldwide. Our Genius™ platform embodies an entirely new technical approach to unlocking and smartly accessing the collective intelligence locked in enterprise contracts and related technical documents.”
This is an important deal for Cognizer. The question is whether it is swallowed up in an acquisition. To date, Cognizer has received only a small amount of seed funding from GigCapital, meaning that Porter still controls whether the firm will IPO or seek funding. However, this deal has the potential to accelerate growth for the firm with very little effort.
Tom Gruber, a co-founder of Siri, former Apple AI lead, and Cognizer Board member, added, “Cognizer realizes the dream of conversational AI – a conversation with an agent that truly understands the meaning of what it is talking about – for the legal domain. After more than a decade of improvement in AI and conversational interaction, it is amazing to see the breakthrough that Cognizer has achieved.
“Its Genius technology has mastered the deep understanding of structured information in unstructured content, such as legal contracts, and offers what it knows in an easy-to-use conversational interface that any professional can use.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a very smart way of introducing a modern user interface for Agiloft with a single partnership. The freemium offer means that companies can try before they buy. The size of clients Agiloft has will mean it should sell a large number of additional user licences if the interface proves popular. It is a great partnership for Cognizer and extends the platform usage to many organisations.
Competitors will watch with interest. If ConvoAI takes off, they will try to emulate the UI, either with Cognizer or another platform.
